The aim of CSPI's Powerbuilding Program is to partner with groups rooted in communities most impacted by food system inequities to create lasting change. Over the past two years, we have convened six BIPOC- and LGBTQIA-led grassroots organizations in a peer learning cohort and provided subgrants to support their projects to co-create programmatic and policy solutions to address issues in the food system. CSPI, through this program, has supported partners to have the capacity to integrate community Powerbuilding and advocacy work on various scales into their direct service and other community engagement efforts. 

Throughout this interactive “cookbook” of recipes to build power in the food system, partner stories and media are shared to uplift the efforts and lessons learned from, with, and by the six Powerbuilding organizations, and our role in supporting this work.  

Cooking up community power: An introduction to CSPI's Powerbuilding Program

Community-based organizations were at the center of food and nutrition policy efforts facilitated by the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s stewardship of philanthropic dollars received in 2020. This collaborative effort aimed to advance healthier, more equitable, and sustainable food systems. However, CSPI’s early partnership recipe revealed gaps in supporting the foundational and often unseen community and Powerbuilding work necessary to build a larger movement to advance and sustain equitable food policy passage.  

Enter CSPI’s inaugural cycle of the Powerbuilding Program. Launched in 2022, Powerbuilding is more than just a program. It offers dedicated funding to build the advocacy capacity of organizations led by and serving people with racialized and/or minoritized identities—through technical assistance and space for peer organizations to connect and learn in community, from community.  

The inaugural Powerbuilding program was a mutual learning experience for CSPI and our partners. In the spirit of peer learning, through this resource, we endeavor to share lessons learned with capacity-building and intermediary policy organizations as well as the philanthropic sector. We seek to elevate the voices, stories, and strategies of the six Powerbuilding partners with the hope of influencing other community-based organizations who desire meaningful change in the food system.  

Testing a new recipe: Why Powerbuilding?

The Powerbuilding Program emerged after internal and external thought partnership exploring approaches to better center equity in CSPI’s role as a regrantor. Like many organizations, in 2020, CSPI began more deeply grappling with organizational positionality, power, and privilege, and began critical internal reflection and deep thought on the role of systemic inequities and the ways these impact food and health. This deepened our commitment to examining and approaching our policy portfolio and regranting efforts through a health equity lens, aiming to more authentically engage communities and center the voices and leadership of people with racialized and/or minoritized identities.  

External contributors to the development of the Powerbuilding Program include Just Strategies, the Praxis Project, and CSPI's  Health Equity Advisory Committee (HEAC), which convened from  2020 to 2022. A few of the recommendations that specifically influenced the design and scope of the Powerbuilding Program included:  

• Creating more flexibility and a less narrow and rigid set of options for fundable policy campaigns; particularly if community groups have articulated strong concerns about particular policy approaches based upon equity.
• Funding and supporting processes that didn’t demand communities' consent to a preset agenda; encouraging community co-design of policy approaches.  
• Investing in applicants’ skills and capacity development.
• Developing a standalone capacity-building grant opportunity to support capacity building, innovation, and community engagement strategies. 

Internally, crosscutting staff at CSPI collaborated to identify opportunities to diversify our partnerships. This program actively sought to engage with organizations that had emerging or beginning experience with policy passage and advocacy, which resulted in an increase of number of applications by 141 percent over the first cycle of regranting. This strategy also improved the number of organizations led by people with Black, Indigenous, and/or Latine identities from 11 percent to 41 percent across the regranting portfolio, with the Powerbuilding Program leading in this area. 

The mission and purpose of organizing is to build power. Without power, we are unable to change conditions in our communities that hurt us. A movement is successful if it transforms the dynamics and relationships of power.

• Alicia Garza, Co-Founder, Black Lives Matter

Hashing out our process: Methods

Guided by racial equity and justice, the aim of the Powerbuilding Program is to partner with groups rooted in communities most impacted by food system inequities to create lasting change. Through an open application process that yielded almost 80 applications, CSPI selected six nonprofit organizations from around the country to participate in the first cohort and funding cycle of the Powerbuilding Program. Partner-led projects as a part of the program included three core activities: convening community members, building skills and power, and co-creating programmatic and policy solutions to pressing issues in the food system. Check out the map below to meet the Powerbuilding partners.

Each Powerbuilding partner organization works in distinct parts of the food system—agriculture, food security, food retail, culturally relevant food, and food and land sovereignty. There was also an assortment of distinct communities and locations covered in the cohort – organizations were rooted in their communities across the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest. Unique communities and subregions represented included New York’s Hudson Valley; the eastside of Dayton, Ohio; the greater DC-Baltimore area; New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward; Zuni Pueblo; and the Paso del Norte region of southern New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. The geographic and issue area diversity of the partners contributed to a rich cohort of peers examining and addressing root cause issues in their community, while centering their constituents in co-creating and advocating for solutions. Our partnership largely centered on funding support for a Powerbuilding project, and a concurrent cohort-based skill-building focused on policy advocacy and storytelling. Additional supports offered to the Powerbuilding partners are listed below. 

Recognizing the unique privilege of stewarding a novel subgranting program, we sought to approach all opportunities to redistribute funding—including through the first cycle of Powerbuilding—with humility, learning from subgrantee partners’ feedback, and operationalizing guidance from leaders in the field, such as embedding the Guiding Principles for Grantmaking into our processes. These principles include: 

• seeking feedback from applicants and subgrantees through qualitative surveys, tying to a core principle of accountability;
• sharing resources and technical assistance with subgrantees via an online Resource Hub, tying to collaboration; and
• committing to racial and health equity by prioritizing BIPOC-led organizations, and utilizing health equity impact metrics to inform decision-making. 

The findings included in this interactive report were gathered through feedback during group cohort sessions and individually, interviews with individuals, and testimonies from community members and program participants of the Powerbuilding partner organizations. We have carefully gleaned and offer insights from the shared experiences of our partners, and from the experiences we have been privileged to have as facilitators and capacity builders.