Agenda - 06-21-2022; 8-a - Minutes

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28 1 Commissioner McKee said the county is already working through this through economic 2 development loans and grants and the farmers using Breeze Farm. 3 Ashley Heger said those farmers were interviewed and they said they could use help in 4 bridging the gap between incubator farm and wholesaling. 5 Commissioner Bedford asked when the MOU will come back to the Board. 6 Ashley Heger said hopefully very soon. She said this is an update and that she has to 7 work with the Attorney's Office to finalize the MOU and that the Board can see the redlined 8 version. 9 Commissioner Bedford said the Climate Reorganization Subcommittee reviewed the 10 MOU and Council Member Slade said the Food Council members choose their own members. 11 She asked who approves their bylaws. She said that she does not want to create a group that 12 the Board has no control over. 13 Ashley Heger said this is the tricky part of embracing relationships and not seeing that 14 as some form of nepotism or playing favorites. She said she is open to as much transparency 15 as possible. She said that she can walk them through how they became a hybrid group of the 16 county. She said in 2019 there was a desire that the Food Council remain an autonomous body 17 that she would help coordinate and they could engage in state level advocacy work. She said 18 now they are not getting close to that type of work. She said if there is a group, like the NC Food 19 System Advocacy Coalition, then they can participate in it. She said they are not a formal 20 advisory board and that one of the reasons is the community said they have disengaged from 21 participating in most of these advisory boards because we see no return and is often a space 22 that is not designed for us. She said when original legal agreement came through, it was 23 decided that the executive committee would have all elected official liaisons and that committee 24 would oversee all final decisions. She said the way members are selected is through a 25 campaign for new members. She said the application asks for information about where people 26 live, work, and how much money they generate. She said they want that information to know if 27 the council is representative of the community and every part of the food system. She said the 28 executive committee make the final decision after reviewing the applications. She said that 29 probably feels informal because that is different than how other advisory boards work in the 30 county. 31 Commissioner Bedford asked for Ashley Heger to provide demographic information on 32 the board. 33 Ashley Heger said up until 2020 they were a majority non-white council. She said age 34 ranges from eighteen and beyond. She said that gender-wise, it is heavily female. She said she 35 would be happy to share trends overtime. 36 Commissioner Greene said she is the elected liaison to the Food Council and has been 37 involved in it since the beginning. She said if the Board is going to say the Council is not 38 working because they are not putting food on tables then that is not going to get anywhere 39 because that is not the purpose of the Food Council and that has never been the purpose. She 40 said that the purpose of the Food Council is to work within and strengthen the food system in 41 Orange County. She said this work is to help farmers that are already mission driven to be a 42 networking farmers and to help them take advantage of changes that the Council can bring to 43 the system. She said that they can use the help of the Council to gain access to places that they 44 had not before. She said they saw during COVID what happens when the food distribution 45 system breaks. She said that there was milk being destroyed in Midwest because they had put it 46 in containers for school children and they did not have the big containers to send it to the 47 grocery store and they found they could not switch on a dime and had to dump the milk down 48 drains. She said that now there is a greater awareness of the need and interest in making local 49 food production and distribution system more robust. She said the comparison is to the 50 Partnership to End Homelessness. She said the Climate Council never had an MOU to begin