Join the 2025 CFF Champion Award winner, Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA), for this year’s Champions Briefing, an event wholly designed and created by the award recipient:

Food justice organizations are often asked to compete for the same limited dollars – isolated from each other, measured against each other, and underequipped to tell their own story. It doesn’t have to be this way. What if the act of seeking funding could itself become an act of coalition-building?

For the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA), regranting is not a workaround or a side project. It is a core strategy for redistributing resources, deepening trust among coalition members, and shifting the local food system away from scarcity and competition toward something more collective. Through its Food Justice Fund, SOFSA moves money directly to food justice organizations serving residents of Syracuse, Onondaga County, and Onondaga Nation using a participatory model: a community Leadership Council selects finalists, and anyone 14 or older in the region can vote on recipients.

But the Food Justice Fund is bigger than the check. It's a vehicle for matchmaking between funders and grassroots organizations, a platform for storytelling and visibility, and a lever for advocating – from the inside – for more equitable funder practices. Grantees gain partnerships, clarity of purpose, and a wider network. SOFSA gains the trust of its coalition and a concrete opportunity to ask funders harder questions about what real support looks like.

In this webinar, SOFSA's team will walk through the full arc of the Food Justice Fund: why they built it, how it works, who it supports, and what they've learned. You'll also hear from Amy Tao Woodley – an inaugural Food Justice Fund grantee who later joined the Leadership Council – whose own journey traces the ripple effects this model can set in motion over time.

Join us for a candid and interactive conversation about sharing resources, building networks, and raising the bar for each other – funders and organizations alike.

Learn:

• How and why SOFSA landed on participatory regranting as a strategy – and how the Food Justice Fund fits within its broader movement-building work

• How the Fund operates in practice, including: 

  • Gathering data to help set priorities

  • Governance through the FJF Leadership Council

  • Creating an accessible application and reporting process

  • Orchestrating a public vote open to every resident 14+

• How to tell your organization's story in ways that resonate – with funders, with communities, and with the public – and why fund-seeking opportunities are often more valuable than the dollar amount

• What funders can do differently to make their support genuinely useful to the organizations they back

Speakers:

• Maura Ackerman, Executive Director, Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance 

• Micah Orieta, Movement-Building Organizer, Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance 

• Amy Tao Woodley, Food Justice Fund Leadership Council Co-Facilitator and Garden Coordinator for Haven Community Garden

With Visual Notetaking by Reb Garofano of @veggiedoodlesoup