How to Support Food Sustainability Organizations
Learn how to support food sustainability organizations working to protect the environment and improve planetary health. This guide covers how to donate, volunteer, and take action with trusted nonprofits committed to building sustainable food systems.
Your Guide to Supporting Food Sustainability Nonprofits for a Healthier Planet”
Supporting a healthier planet starts with the way we grow, produce, and consume food. Around the world, food sustainability organizations are working to reduce food waste, promote climate-friendly agriculture, protect natural resources, and create equitable, resilient food systems. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn how to support food sustainability nonprofits—whether through donating, volunteering, advocating, or participating in community programs. I’m highlighting trusted, reliable organizations making a measurable impact, along with practical tips for getting involved and helping reduce the environmental footprint of our food system. If you’re passionate about planetary health, climate solutions, sustainable agriculture, and eco-friendly food practices, this guide offers meaningful ways to take action and make a difference.
Helping to protect the environment has never been easier, thanks to an amazing lineup of non-profit food sustainability organizations working hard to protect the current and future state of our planet in multiple ways, including those that impact social, economic, nutrition, and environmental factors. Without these environmental organizations advocating and informing people on how to better protect our Earth through our food system, even more planetary resources might have been depleted by now. After all, how your food is produced dramatically impacts the planet’s ecosystems, depletes resources, and accelerates the impact climate change has on the planet, which is why supporting environmentally friendly organizations is an important way to mitigate these repercussions.
How Can You Help the Planet?
Donating, volunteering, or advocating with a non-profit sustainability organization that supports the environment and an equitable food system is a great way to protect current and future generation’s access to sustainable food that supports their nutritional and cultural preferences. Learn more about volunteering for sustainable food organizations here. Supporting non-profit organizations that work to protect the planet can help mitigate the impacts that climate change has inflicted on our ecosystem, inform the public on the importance of caring for our Earth, and advocate for policy makers to develop policies with the intention of nurturing a sustainable food system for all people.
Sustainability Food Organizations to Support
All types of eco-friendly organizations are important when it comes to protecting our planet, since a healthy, clean environment is the foundation for adequate wellbeing for all people. Some organizations work toward achieving environmental justice for all, while others work to ensure that a population has a sustainable food system model to allow all members of the community to obtain food security. Also, a variety of organizations advocate politicians and companies to address environmental damage due to the industrial production model through policies that can nourish people and the planet. Other organizations work toward addressing issues regarding food systems, food justice, farm labor justice, food waste, and changing the magnitude of the current food systems’ environmental impact. All of these topics are important when it comes to caring for our Earth, because achieving sustainable food systems, farm worker justice, environmental justice, and food security for all will pivot the current food system model to a sustainable one.
Food Sustainability Organizations to Support
Check out this list of food sustainability organizations, including charitable and non-profits, working hard to support a healthier planet for generations to come.
| Name of Organization | Category |
Mission Statement
|
| Arcadia | Food System |
To improve the health of our community, support the viability of local farmers, and preserve the environment for future generations.
|
| Barilla | Food System |
Address today’s major food-related issues with a multidisciplinary approach and from the environmental, economic, and social perspective to secure the wellbeing and health of people and the planet.
|
| Berry Good Food | Food Justice/Food System |
Empower the community by building bridges between farmers, chefs, scientists, and citizens to challenge the industrial food system while advocating for access to healthy food to all.
|
| Big Green | Food Justice |
Work as allies and advocate for marginalized communities by challenging person biases, developing racial literacy with ongoing education, challenge racist ideas, actions, and behaviors, and acknowledge racial privilege and work with people of color to dismantle institutional inequalities, especially those found in school food environment.
|
| Black Food Justice | Food Justice/Sovereignty |
To develop Black leadership, supporting Black communities, organizing Black self-determination, and building institutions for Black food sovereignty and liberation.
|
| Black Urban Growers | Food Justice |
Committed to building networks and community support for growers in both urban and rural settings to nurture collective Black leadership to ensure they have a seat at the table.
|
| CARE | Food Security/Food System |
To serve individuals and families in the poorest communities in the world that are suffering from food insecurity.
|
| Chef Ann | Food Justice/Food Access |
Dedicated to promoting whole ingredient, scratch cooking in schools, to serve the healthiest, tastiest meals so that children are well nourished and ready to learn.
|
| Center for Food Safety | Food System |
To empower people, support farms, and protect the earth from the harmful impacts of industrial agriculture. Protect and promote the right to safe food and the environment.
|
| CAGI | Farm Labor/Food System |
Work to transform unjust trade and agricultural policies and practices imposed by corporations, governments, and foundations. Promote alternatives that embody values of racial, social, and environmental justice, collective liberation, solidarity, community self-determination, and ecological health.
|
| Crop Trust | Environmental Impact on Food Systems |
To ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide.
|
| Cheyenne River Youth Project | Food Sovereignty |
To provide the youth of Cheyenne River reservation with access to a vibrant and secure future through a wide variety of culturally sensitive and enduring programs, projects, and facilities that ensure strong, self -sufficient families and communities.
|
| Dream of Wild Health | Food Sovereignty |
To restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways.
|
| Eat Forum | Food System |
A fair and sustainable global food system for healthy people and planet, leaving no one behind.
|
| Fair Trade America | Farm Justice/Labor |
To connect disadvantaged producers and consumers, promote fairer trading conditions, and empower producers to combat poverty, strengthen their position, and take more control over their lives.
|
| Familia Unidas Justica | Farm Labor |
To represent Indigenous families and Spanish-speaking workers with the hope of securing a better future for the hand harvesters in local fields of Washington.
|
| Farmland Trust | Farm Justice/Food System |
To save the land that sustains us by protecting farmland, promoting sound farming practices, and keeping farmers on land.
|
| Farm Sanctuary | Humane Animal Practices |
To end suffering of animals in agriculture and foster just and compassionate vegan living.
|
| Farm Worker Justice | Farm Labor Justice |
To empower migrant and seasonal farmworkers to improve their living and working conditions, immigration status, health, occupational safety, and access to justice.
|
| FLOC | Farm Labor |
To challenge the deplorable conditions of the broader workforce that remains voiceless, powerless, and invisible to mainstream America.
|
| Feeding America | Hunger |
To feed America’s hungry through a national network of member food banks and engage our country in the fight to end hunger.
|
| Food Chain Workers | Farm Labor |
To build a more sustainable food system that respects workers’ rights, based on the principles of social, environmental, and racial justice.
|
| Food First | Food Access/Food System/Sovereignty |
To give the public the tools to understand the global food system, build a local food movement, and engage with the global movement of food sovereignty.
|
| Food Recovery Network | Hunger |
To encourage students around America to fight against food waste and hunger.
|
| Food + Planet | Food System |
To empower health care professionals to advance sustainable food systems.
|
| Foodtank | Food System/Food Access |
To educate, inspire, advocate, and create change and support environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable ways to alleviate hunger, obesity, and poverty and create a network of people, organizations, and content to push for food system change.
|
| GAIN | Food Justice |
To advance nutrition outcomes by improving the consumption of nutritious and safe food for all people.
|
| Harlem Grow | Food Justice/Hunger |
To inspire youth to lead healthy and ambitious lives through mentorship and hands on education in urban farming, sustainability, and nutrition, and turn vacate lots into urban gardens to provide adequate nutrition for residents.
|
| ICC Alaska | Food Sovereignty |
To promote food sovereignty across the Inuit and unify the Inuit by advocating for wildlife management sovereignty.
|
| Kiss the Ground | Food System |
To awaken people to the possibilities of regeneration, to provide everyone with the pathways to find their unique way forward and the resources to do so.
|
| Land Institute | Environmental Impact on Food System |
To develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned, while promoting community life at once prosperous and enduring.
|
| NAFSA | Food Sovereignty/Justice |
To advocate for and support all levels of food security and food sovereignty in local, tribal, regional, national, and international arenas.
|
| NFU | Farm Labor |
To advocate for family farmers, ranchers, fishers, and their communities through education, cooperation, and legislation.
|
| Post Harvest | Food System |
To provide innovative programs that motivate and empower people to reduce food losses and waste.
|
| Rock and Wrap It Up | Food Access |
To encourage the use of the Whole Earth Calculator Climate literacy lesson plans to enable students to connect their actions to the reduction of poverty and carbon footprints.
|
| Slow Food USA | Food Access |
To reconnect Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils, and waters that produce our food and provide good, clean, fair food for all.
|
| Sustainable Harvest | Food System/Food Justice |
To preserve the environment by partnering with families to improve well-being through sustainable farming.
|
| The Hunger Project | Food Justice |
To end hunger and poverty by pioneering sustainable, grassroots, women-centered strategies and advocating for their widespread adoption in countries throughout the world.
|
| Tilth Alliance | Farm Justice/Food Access/Food System |
To build a sustainable, healthy, and equitable food future.
|
| Wholesome Wave | Food Access |
To combat food insecurity and hunger by providing healthy food to low-income Americans.
|
| Why Hunger | Food Access |
To end hunger and advance the human right to nutritious food in the U.S and around the world.
|
| World Food Program USA | Food Access |
To work with U.S policy makers, corporations, foundations, and individuals to help provide financial and in-kind resources, and develop policies needed to alleviate global hunger.
|
Note: This is not a complete list of non-profit sustainable food system organizations.
Learn more about sustainable food systems here:
- What is Food Sovereignty?
- How Can I Make Choices That Support Food Sustainability?
- Growing Diet Diversity for a Healthy Planet
- The Myriad Benefits of Community Gardens
- Food Assistance Programs at Farmers Markets
- 5 Ways to Get Involved in Your Local Food System
- What is Regenerative Agriculture?
- Volunteer Opportunities to Help Reduce Food Insecurity