The Alaska Food Policy Council wants organizations and individuals to please join its Alaska Food System Network map. It only takes a few minutes to set up your profile, then you can find connections.

You can join by clicking this link, https://www.akfoodpolicycouncil.org/regional-food-system-participate

Individuals and organizations may add their own profile to our growing network of state-wide food systems assets. Our mapping goal is to clearly show where our food knowledge, skill sets, and tangible resources (like storage and processing) exist across the state.

This could include work in the food supply chain, education, aid and access, production, harvest, knowledge bearing, and more. By joining the statewide network, with some context about how you work in food, you are contributing to a state-wide directory of assets that will be publicly shared.

Joining the network also helps the Alaska Food Policy Council know who is doing what in the state, so we can better connect people with appropriate resources when we receive an inquiry. 

This is part of an 18-month USDA Regional Food System Partnership planning grant coordinated by the Alaska Food Policy Council. The next step will be part of an implementation grant to take the results of all of of the local/regional asset-mapping sessions and use them to build a 10-year state food security plan.

The Sitka Local Foods Network hosted one of the 12-14 regional nodes in this project, which included an asset-mapping workshop on Feb. 19. In Sitka, we hope to use some of the information and connections gathered in today’s workshop to improve our local food security. We also hope to use the information to possibly update the 2014 Sitka Community Food Assessment Indicators Report, which gave us a lot of baseline planning data that now is nearly a decade old.