Food & Nutrition Relief

The Wave Foundation serves communities experiencing food insecurity with regional, nutritious, and culturally relevant foods sourced from historically disadvantaged farmers, ranchers, fishers, and food producers. Since June 2020, we have sourced more than 8 million pounds of foods and delivered over 7 million meals. Your generous donation supports this important collaborative work. Thank you.

The Wave Foundation collaborates with a coalition of private, public, and community-based partners to address the interrelated challenges of food insecurity, food waste, climate change, and socioeconomic inequality. The current industrial food system perpetuates these problems, which disproportionately impact low-income communities as well as Native Americans and other communities of color. Communities of color are less likely to have adequate access to nutritious and culturally desirable food and have experienced systemic barriers to building successful food/farm businesses due to the legacy of public and private sector discrimination, including racism, land dispossession, and exploitative agricultural systems with roots in colonialism and slavery, presenting enduring barriers to accessing markets along with capital, credit, land, equipment, and technical assistance. Women producers, especially minority women, have also experienced systemic barriers to business development and success, including being unjustifiably denied USDA loans. Despite structural disadvantages, small-scale, women, and producers of color are on the front lines of socially and environmentally sustainable food systems, returning important cultural, health, and economic value to their families and communities. Our work has strengthened farm/food businesses led by women and people of color, increasing their access to technical assistance and high-profit markets, and has helped advance the Tribal food sovereignty movement. COVID-19 exacerbated food system challenges in the last five years. In response, we developed our Food Programs, which in just three years have reached 650,000 people facing food insecurity with culturally desirable food donations and supported 1,000+ businesses, the majority of which are owned by Native and other people of color.

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The Wave Foundation strengthens community health, local economies, and environmental sustainability. Our work touches an array of interrelated sectors: food, energy, transportation, zero waste, and clean air and water. At the center of our Food Program are partnerships led by Indigenous communities to restructure the food supply chain guided by the imperative for food that is local, nutritious, culturally appropriate—and distributed equitably. We listen to the First peoples of this land, whose focus has forever been on sustainability and stewardship. The Wave Foundation’s ultimate goal is to help establish community based and community driven food systems that allow communities to move towards food sovereignty. The Wave Foundation is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and we are based in Oregon. Learn more about us here. 

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