Mission & Approach

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Mission:

Healthy food for everyone through collaboration, education and promoting self-reliance.

Vision:

To grow a thriving local food system where consumers make informed decisions; farmers make a decent living while prioritizing ecological stewardship of the land; and all people – regardless of income – have access to healthy food. We push beyond the immediate demands of hunger relief toward community food security (and hunger prevention) with programming that expands our community’s capacity to feed each other today and into the future.

Guiding Principles:

1) Food and quality nutrition is the foundation for well-being for the individual. The well-being of our community is directly linked to the health of the soil and ecosystem that feeds us;

2) All people, regardless of income, deserve access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food at all times;

3) Healthy behaviors are rooted in an appreciation and re-valuing of the food, land, and people that provide for us;

4) To move from emergency handouts toward long-term community food resilience, we must prioritize community capacity building and development of the individual’s sense of agency;

5) We are engaged in an evolving conversation and thus programming must remain responsive and dynamic to shifting community priorities and needs.

6) All parts of the system are inter-connected and thus solutions must benefit multiple stakeholders of the food system;

7) Diversity- cultural, biological, socio-economic, nutritional, and linguistic- cultivates and strengthens individual and community resilience.

Organizational Priorities:

Building Community Food Security through Access, Education, Engagement, and Empowerment!

1) Access: Increase access to healthy food for low-income families and seniors while improving the economic viability of local farms;

2) Education: Foster positive relationships to food and increase healthy behaviors and lifestyles for all people, especially those facing diet-related diseases;

3) Empowerment: Build skills and community capacity in gardening, farming, food preparation and preservation, as well as hands-on experiences addressing malnutrition in our community

4) Engagement: Expand community engagement, collaboration and action around solutions to food waste, food insecurity, ecological harm and other shortfalls of our conventional food system with methods that empower food insecure community members into a greater sense of agency-turning recipients into participants.

Our Approach

The environmental, economic, and health impacts of our conventional food system requires community-based solutions that are collaborative, prevention-focused, systems-oriented and benefit multiple stakeholders.

By convening people from diverse sectors and experiences, we design innovative programming that responds to the need of our community and works toward our common vision. Not a food bank or pantry, Bounty is a small group of community organizers, facilitators and farmers that, over the past ten years, has played a large role in shifting the local conversation from just hunger relief to addressing underlying systemic problems for long term and lasting change toward hunger prevention.

Our work goes beyond conversation with measurable and notable impacts including: expanded economic opportunities for local farms; the quality of food pantry offerings; food waste and greenhouse gas emissions prevention; food miles saved; school and youth visits to our farm; attitudes toward healthy food and lifestyles; increased knowledge of sustainable farming techniques, self-sufficiency skills, and the importance of food security for all; policy and advocacy to direct service providers to local and state laws; number of at-risk youth trained; and increase of CalFresh customers served at local farmers’ markets.

For a description of programs, please click on this link.