Community Food Advocates

Founded in 2010, CFA’s most significant current initiatives are: 1) Lunch 4 Learning Coalition (L4L) to transform the school lunch experience and maximize student participation by advocating for high-impact scalable initiatives and building on our success of securing universal free school meals (USM) for all 1.1 million NYC public school students in 2017; 2) Healthy School Meals For All NY Kids (HSMFA) which advocates for statewide USM for NYS’s 2.7 million children (we succeeded in May 2023 and are working on maximizing its impact). In addition, Youth Food Advocates (YFA) is our unique youth leadership program that positions high school students as content experts in school food issues and prepares them to fully engage in the policymaking process. 3) NYC Good Food Purchasing Program Coalition (GFPP) and 4) the NYS GFPP Coalition. CFA leads the GFPP campaigns to advocate for NYC and NYS municipalities statewide to adopt values-forward institutional procurement practices to transform our local and regional food systems through the power of public food procurement. All four campaigns engage strategic, highly effective, broad reaching coalitions