The Movement for Community-led Development

By Ian Smith* This article was originally published by Foodtank at this link. The Movement for Community Led Development in Liberia (MCLD-Liberia) is helping farmers address challenges with home-grown solutions. Through these efforts, they are working to empower women and youth and to ensure that international development in their country is driven by communities. In… Read more: Farmers Spearheading Community Led Development in Liberia

During the World Bank Annual meetings in Washington DC on October 12, 2022, civil society and World Bank officials discussed ways to #ShiftThePower to small-scale producers. The event — Good Food Begins with Farmers: building resilience to prevent future food crises addressed the food crisis caused by climate change, conflict, inflation and COVID-19, which is… Read more: Standing with small-scale producers at the World Bank Annual Meetings

MCLD-Liberia reports it has recently mobilized its members for a series of self-reliant community-led action projects. In these recent photos, you see the graduation from the chapter’s Home, Business and community management program, and a community action program to build walkways to deal with flooding.

On May 25, 2022 the Movement for Community-led Development discussed our role in ending world hunger. This call leads up to the World Hunger Day social media campaign on May 28. The Hunger Project recently conducted a comprehensive literature review on the causal links between CLD and ending hunger. We encourage you to review the… Read more: Ending Hunger and CLD

Ending hunger is not just about food. It requires the convergence of multiple nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive interventions at the community level.

November 24, 2021 – More than 95 activists for community-led nutrition action met to emphasize key community-led strategies and share three case studies. Good nutrition requires not only affordable access to nutritious food, but an entire local system of community-owned programs – what has often been termed a “food environment.” As identified in the Lancet… Read more: Nutrition for Growth Side Event: Community Ownership Key to Good Nutrition

Local Means Local: Community Leadership and Facilitation in CLD, a two-part multi-lingual learning event to share the findings from phase 2 of our collaborative research. We shared the key findings, implications, and recommendations from a Rapid Realist Review of 56 community-led programs.

By Kristiann Koris and Anya Petranovic Introduction In September 2021, the UN Secretary-General will convene a Food Systems Summit as part of the Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. In response to the Summit’s invitation for civil society participation, the Movement for Community-led Development (MCLD) is taking bold and… Read more: Key Takeaways from our Independent Food Systems Dialogue

By Tim Prewitt, CEO – The Hunger Project This year, the world is coming together to chart a path toward a more sustainable and equitable food system—a system that can meet the demands of our ever-growing population and is resilient to environmental shocks.  Having spent my career working on food systems, I can easily say… Read more: Food Systems For All

Featured photo: Primary school students receiving a nutritious, daily school meal with USDA donated commodities from PCI’s McGovern-Dole project in Huehuetenango, Guatemala and commodities purchased by PTAs with funds from Guatemala’s Ministry of Education. Photo Credit: Project Concern International, a Global Communities Partner Written by Stephanie Gaffney, Technical Advisor for Integrated School Feeding and Sustainable… Read more: Shifting the Power: Sustaining School Feeding Programs through Active Stakeholder Engagement

Featured Photo Credit: IIRR By Peter Williams, President, International Institute of Rural Reconstruction A stark global demographic projection, paired with the limited capacity to produce food at a low environmental cost, is cause for one of the most food insecure periods in modern times. The food crisis affecting more than 25% of the world’s population… Read more: Community-led Food System Models: Self-Sustaining and Shock-Resilient

By Eugene Cho, President/CEO, Bread for the World Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown III, the senior pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, would not have expected the food system in the community to play such a large role in his ministry. But when he joined Pleasant Hope in 2010, he soon found himself praying with ailing members of the church beside their hospital beds.   Diabetes and other chronic conditions related to… Read more: A Garden of Inspiration in Baltimore

By Casey Harrison, Livelihoods and Agribusiness Director, Nuru International Featured Image Caption:  Genda Farmer Cooperative Savings Committee Meeting in Ethiopia (photo taken prior to COVID-19 pandemic) Localizing Professionalism within Food Systems Nuru Kenya, Nuru Ethiopia, Nuru Nigeria, and Nuru International view the merging of business professionalism and the local context as a necessary prerequisite for… Read more: Transforming Food Systems Through Professional Farmer Organizations

Abstract: Food and market systems consistently evolve requiring astute management by suppliers to remain competitive. To meet this challenge, World Vision invests in smallholder farmer entrepreneurship. Through training, mentoring and technical support to networks of market actors, World Vision catalyzes food and market systems change through intergroup collaboration and market-driven intragroup competition, leading to a… Read more: Community action, levers of change: Reorienting more inclusive & resilient local food systems

By Dr. Kevin W. Prine President & CEO, Outreach International Alongside our local program partners and leaders, Outreach International supports communities to organize and access the resources necessary to overcome their most pressing challenges. For many households, such challenges pertain to food shortages, and it is through processes that are community-led, driven, and owned that… Read more: Outreach International: Mobilizing Resilient Community-Led Food Systems

The March global Zoom gathering of the Movement for Community-led Development featured special presentations by: Ritu Sharma, president of Radiant Advocacy and a member of the Steering Committee of the Coalition for a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States. Learn more at this link, and scroll to the bottom to sign on! Joanna Veltri,… Read more: Feminism and Food Systems

John Coonrod, PhD. Executive Vice President, The Hunger Project and coordinator, the Movement for Community-led Development, 31 March 2021 Abstract: The pandemic has shown us once again that our current, increasingly centralized food system not only fails to meet the basic requirement of ensuring year-round affordable access to nutrition rich food for all, it has… Read more: Systems Thinking for Community-led Food Systems

November 24, 2020: What are the linkages between community-led development, nutritional health, and local resilience? And how has the COVID era highlighted the urgent need for all three? An MCLD sponsored event offered practical insights to these questions and more through presentations from Nuru Nigeria, Gardens for Health in Rwanda, and Uganda’s Food Rights Alliance,… Read more: Community Action for Nutrition

By: Deirdre McMahon, Global Nutrition Advisor, SNV  Malnutrition isn’t the result of a simple cause-and-effect algorithm. It can’t be boiled down into an if-then statement. It’s the result of a complex web of underlying factors and interrelated causes. And in response to that complexity, reducing malnutrition requires convergent action from many different sectors and stakeholders. … Read more: Creating an Integrated Nutrition Game-Plan: Technical Brief and Recommendations from Lao PDR