Advocacy Working Group

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The Advocacy Working Group advanced a broad strategy to strengthen public understanding of food insecurity, support frontline efforts, and inform policy change across Edmonton and the Prairies. The group identified key advocacy areas, focused on education, systems-level barriers, and community-led solutions that center lived experience.

A gathering of people seated around a table at an event or celebration. The table has a colorful, patterned cloth with a bowl of snacks and some brochures. In the background, there are booths with displays and banners, and a projection screen on the wall.
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What we’ve done

The Advocacy Working Group has been advancing a broad strategy to strengthen public understanding of food insecurity, support frontline efforts, and inform policy change across Edmonton and the Prairies. The group has identified key advocacy areas, focused on education, systems-level barriers, and community-led solutions.

  • The team developed public education efforts that highlighted barriers to food access, systemic inequities, and opportunities to reduce food waste through business partnerships. Learning sessions held in 2025-2026 informed this area.

  • Meetings with frontline and mutual aid groups continued to identify persistent challenges, including limited funding, restrictive bylaws, systemic inequities, and mental-health strains.

  • Hosted 13 intimate, monthly/bi-monthly hybrid "Learning Sessions" from April 2025 - March 2026. This learning series centred and amplified lived experience, engaged hundreds of attendees, and generated community resources and education. They also created spaces of connection and amplified community voices. An archive of documentation of these sessions can be found on our blog.

  • Building relationships and opportunities for collaboration was a key priority. We identified and expanded regional relationships with partners in Calgary, Winnipeg, and across the Prairies. Thanks to generous funding by Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), the John Humphrey Centre for Microgrant funding awarded 10 projects who will report back on their initiatives at a roundtable sharing circle planned for January 7 2026. The group is also expanding regional relationships with partners in Calgary, Winnipeg, and across the Prairies.

    Additionally, the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights (JHC) and Righting Relations Edmonton Circle, supported by the Royal Bank of Canada, distributed $30,000 across 21 grassroots microgrants over two years to fund localized, community-designed food sovereignty projects. By bypassing institutional bottlenecks, this initiative empowered local food justice efforts while fostering capacity-building and sustainable, community-driven solutions for food insecurity.

  • A bibliography on food security and policy research has been drafted to support data-informed advocacy. If you are interested in gaining access to it, please email us at info@foodjusticeyeg.ca.

    A storytelling and educational campaign initiative, called Stories of Food Justice, also launched in Spring 2026, with the goal of shifting public and policy understanding of food insecurity from a charitable issue to one acknowledging food security is rooted in systemic racism, colonialism and disconnection from the land — amplifying community-led food growing, sovereignty, and lived experience, and grounded in access to food as a human right.

  • Read our report here. Developed by FSFJE’s Advocacy and Communications Working Group, this document brings together community-identified priorities, advocacy ideas, and policy pathways gathered through 18 months of engagement, research, and collaboration. Grounded in lived experience and community knowledge, it explores systemic barriers to food security and opportunities for meaningful change. Rather than a finalized advocacy strategy, it serves as a shared resource to inform future priorities, partnerships, and collective action toward a more equitable and dignified food system.

  • The John Humphrey Centre has drafted a Food Advocacy Strategic Plan, which provides a guide for future advocacy work and aligns the shared priorities across working groups and the community that were engaged in the two-year project, Food Security Food Justice Edmonton (FSFJE). 

  • Help amplify some of the tools created in collaboration with community partners in Edmonton and more broadly across Alberta and the Prairies. Join the WhatsApp Community, share the recently launched Edmonton Food Resource Map, or help amplify the work of local food stakeholders and initiatives and calls to action.

  • Check out the ‘Take Action’ Page to continue amplifying this important food work, both on a local level and to encourage systemic policy change that is grounded in a human-rights lens of food justice, dignity, and lived experience.

Help us carry the work forward!