The mission of the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is to educate about the importance of Western Colorado's agricultural land and legacy, and to provide a platform for rural leadership in support of secure and equitable food systems, sustainable agriculture, watershed health, climate action, and a resilient future for the Gunnison River region and beyond.
Our Story
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance grew from the grassroots efforts of western Colorado agricultural operators, ranchers, food producers, and community members who organized in opposition to a series of oil and gas lease sales in the North Fork Valley.
Since then we have broadened our work to developing rural leadership and networks that support equitable and resilient food systems, and which promote the healthy lands and watersheds that secure them.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance welcomes participation from a range of organizations, individuals, and businesses on our various projects. Please contact us to get involved!
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance vision is of a state where a healthy food system supports resilient communities that are economically secure, socially equitable, and ecologically sustainable.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance believes that local food security means addressing long-term sustainability issues like climate change, fostering rural prosperity and fairness, and sharing hands-on skills that help communities bring ideas to fruition.
Our theory of change embraces the metamorphic nature of transformation drawing from the analogy of the butterfly, follows a grounded practice of community organizing, and seeks the humble effectiveness of quiet leadership.
Lasting change requires dissolution of old patterns, cultivation of new possibilities, and emergence of something fundamentally different.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance’s approach recognizes three integrated phases, invests in local partnerships and leaders, and manifests as a collective capacity to adapt, learn, and evolve—much like a butterfly emerges with new capacities to navigate toward what it needs to flourish.
The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance seeks to strengthen western Colorado’s family farms and local food movement and to connect communities from “farm to table.” We promote conservation and climate action and cultivate rural leadership and resilience. The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance works in partnership with many organizations, campaigns and businesses, across the region and nation, with a shared understanding that protecting the environment, local agriculture and rural places go hand and hand.
