Fwd: [members] Advocates opposing the House Farm Bill
Karen Lehman
The Farm to Fork Initiative is supporting a diverse set of food policy advocates who are coordinating advocacy efforts around the 2018 Farm Bill. As you may know, the Farm Bill currently working its way through the House of Representatives would slash a variety of programs that are critical to making our food system stronger, including cuts to SNAP, conservation, food safety and services for rural communities. You can find out more about the specific provisions of the draft Farm Bill and their impact here: https://www.betterfarmbill.org/. This rotten bill is giving advocates an important opportunity to demonstrate unity, diversity and strength, and we are proud to be supporting these groups speaking out together.
With a pause between the House Agriculture Committee vote and a possible floor vote on the bill, we believe we have an opportunity to demonstrate the widespread opposition to this bill – from a broad range of advocates at a national and a local level – in order to not only influence members of the House, but also members of the Senate Agriculture committee who are currently negotiating their own version of a Farm Bill.
With that goal in mind, we are developing a list of all the national, state and local organizations, businesses and individuals who oppose the bill passed by the House Agriculture Committee. We are working to gather as many names as possible, as quickly as possible, so that in advance of the vote by the full House, we can release and promote a powerful list of hundreds of names – including stakeholders in key lawmakers’ own states and districts. So far, we have more than 100 signatures from groups representing 27 different states and dozens of sectors – from chefs and academics to local farming associations and policy shops.
We created a Google form to capture names for this list. While private foundations don’t take positions on legislation, your grantees often do. If you’d like to share this with them to help inform their work in the sector, please do. They can access the list and add their organization at: http://bit.ly/2F0Vslv. We are encouraging folks to sign on and to share this link far and wide to help us build this list. The deadline for signatories is Monday, April 30.
A few more details on this effort are below.
- The list is a collaborative effort spearheaded by a diverse set of advocacy organizations including the Food Research and Action Center, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Food Policy Action, Environmental Working Group, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Natural Resources Defense Council, Union of Concerned Scientists and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
- We plan to post the list on Food Policy Action’s website and possibly on other groups’ sites as well. We are also looking at launching digital ads on Politico.com or TheHill.com that would publicize and link to the list, potentially using geo-fencing to target these ads to Congressional staffers.
- All email addresses collected for the purposes of the sign-on letter will not be added to any distribution list or used for anything other than getting in touch with organizations that sign on with any questions.
Thank you for your help getting the word out. After April 30, the full list of signatures will be shared with all groups that participate. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me or Emily Gardner at Spitfire (em...@spitfirestrategies.com), who is help coordinating this effort.
Sincerely,
Eric Kessler
On behalf of the Farm to Fork Initiative, a project of the Windward Fund