About Fresh Taste

Fresh Taste 

…encouraging diverse local agriculture and healthy eating for all in Chicago and across Illinois.

 Who We Are

Fresh Taste is a partnership born of learning, sharing, and the recognition of common interests by a group of foundations and the City of Chicago. 

The values we share include:

 

• Equity of food access 

   
• Sustainability (environmental, economic and social)

• Community and economic development that promotes fairness and environmental stewardship 

• Diversity, as it applies to both human populations and food across the region 

Our founding Steering Committee partners are:

 

• The Chicago Community Trust 
• City of Chicago Department of Zoning and Land Use Planning 
• Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation
• Liberty Prairie Foundation
• Lumpkin Family Foundation

Recent associate members include: 

• Leo S. Guthman Fund 
• J.R. Albert Foundation
• Walter S. Mander Foundation 

Fresh Taste is a staffed initiative jointly paid for and operated by the Fresh Taste partners with additional support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Kraft Foods, and the Prince Charitable Trusts. We invite additional participation.

 

Our Vision 

 

Chicago is the center of a highly productive and diverse multi-state “foodshed”—a concept recently coined to represent where a given population’s food comes from and how it gets there. Our focus is Illinois, but the foodshed includes parts of Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and even Minnesota.

If the capacity of our foodshed was fully used and its products dedicated to the Chicagoland market, it could provide a very considerable portion of the region’s food needs, a healthy working landscape, and a significant stimulus to our economy.  

We envision a region in which diverse communities have access to healthy, affordable, sustainably produced, and fairly priced food. Our aim is to provide leadership that brings stakeholders interested in healthy food in Illinois together to stimulate deeper conversations and increased investments of time and money, leading ultimately to changes in the manner by which food is produced, distributed and consumed in Illinois.  These investments may be public, private and nonprofit, as the partners recognize that food system interventions require all three.  Fresh Taste aims for a food system that is accessible to diverse communities, promotes environmental sustainability, and stimulates community and economic development across the region in rural communities, suburban areas and urban centers. 

 

How We Will Work

Fresh Taste is conceived as a catalytic process, rather than an implementing organization.  Our goal is to bring about change in the system as a whole, not in piecemeal projects.  Our intent is to work collaboratively ourselves and support collaborative work among a diverse range of community-based non-profit organizations, private businesses and the public sector.

 

Therefore we will:

• Seek out promising opportunities for collaboration on significant food system issues 
• Convene dialogues to spark collaborative work where none is currently happening 
• Support research that will serve local food system initiatives 
• Develop initiative support strategies that include grantmaking, private investment, and public policy tools 

 

 For more information, contact us at info (at) freshtaste.org or 773.944.5100