Overview

Weaving Local and Regional

NESAWG is a weaver organization. Weaver work involves linking, connecting, intersecting.  It means bringing groups together to foster information exchange and resource sharing. It means scaling out and scaling up — horizontally linking within and across sectors, and vertically linking from local to global within a multi-organizational, mission-aligned framework. NESAWG’s work facilitates the efficient use of precious resources. Without NESAWG, organizations would not as easily find the synergies, resources, expertise, partnerships, and critical mass necessary to achieve their food system goals.

Weaver work promotes solidarity. NESAWG enables groups to build common cause and a unified voice. We provide forums and communications tools critical to making connections.  We reach out, organize, and harmonize the many voices in the Northeast’s food system. By weaving together multiple interests, our call for change is more potent and clear.

Advocating Regionalism

Regionalism is emerging as a powerful principle in public policy and economic development. Regional thinking is beginning to capture the attention of policy-makers. Set in a context with local and community-based food systems on one end, and globalism on the other, regionalism bridges the dichotomy of local-global.  Regional — like local — is a spatial reference. It implies geography and distance. For us, local is nested in regions, and regions nest within greater regions. But thinking regionally is also about the quality of transactions within our geographic bounds. Regional is more than “a thousand points of local.” We seek food system solutions that improve the viability of all our farms and communities, conserve energy, provide fair conditions for everyone along the food supply chain, reduce food imports, increase access to healthy foods for all, and protect our natural resources.

Rooted in place and culture, NESAWG’s regional network builds strategic alliances that bridge issues and scale, empowering organizations to become effective participants in deep democracy. Our place-based network is a unique category of network, different from sector (e.g., agricultural economists) and topic (e.g., farm policy). NESAWG embraces and connects groups across sector and topic, liberating the Northeast’s sustainable agriculture movement from silos and forging a unified agenda.

Serving Our Network

Serving 12 Northeast states (CT, DE, MA, ME, MD, NH, NJ, NY, RI, VT, and WV), and the District of Columbia, NESAWG is both a facilitator and a convener of regional food system development initiatives. We organize, mobilize, and support our network by:

• Building a sense of community and empowerment within our region.
• Maintaining a collective voice for regional needs, approaches, and solutions.
• Reaching out and serving a broad-based constituency with multiple communication vehicles.
• Engaging, informing, and motivating our community with rich information resources.
• Spotlighting cutting edge issues as they emerge and encouraging actionable strategies.
• Providing forums and venues for collaboration, dialogue, and consensus building.
• Organizing work groups around common problems to develop and share solutions.
• Teaching the process of public policy evolution and fostering capacity for advocacy.
• Nurturing alliances that cultivate common ground and strengthen collective action.
• Sustaining a regional voice and perspective as individual organizations come and go.

NESAWG helps organizations frame, clarify, and achieve their food system change goals. Without taking policy positions, we see to it that our region is adequately informed about issues, options, and actions, so that groups — in particular those with less institutional capacity — can meaningfully participate. With and on behalf of our network participants, NESAWG raises the voice of the region in federal policy deliberations. We translate the federal to local and regional, and bring local and regional to federal. As a result, groups that don’t focus on policy — because of their mission or their resources — know their interests are being represented and there is a place for them to bring their policy concerns and ideas. Together we work to address:

• Farm viability and food system economic development;
• Equity and fairness throughout the food system;
• Natural resource conservation and enhancement;
• Food access, security, and nutrition; and
• Food citizenship.

As a broad-based multi-sector network, NESAWG is uniquely positioned to do effective movement building. Our regional perspective and Internet presence make us a central repository for actions, projects, materials, and ideas at all levels throughout the 12-state region.  We are uniquely positioned to know — or find out — what’s happening in the Northeast and beyond. This saves members from wasting energy researching, reinventing, and duplicating.

In addition to our network functions, our network is valuable as an end in itself.  While it may be convened to advance a common agenda, it is not built simply as a means to achieve specific goals. A network such as NESAWG is a community defined by the shared values with which its members strongly identify. Our network is a guardian of these values. We create a robust container for this passion. The NESAWG network has enormous value just by existing. The strength of our community inspires participants to take action — to lead and to follow.