Vision, Mission, and Principles

The Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems (CRFS) works to ensure a world where all have access to nutritious food that is sustainably produced by local people. We do this through collaborative agroecological systems research and knowledge-sharing that strengthen the capacities of farmer groups, research institutions, development organizations, and others.

Our goal:

Cultivate resilient food systems globally by bridging farmer-centered agroecological research, action, and influence.

Two intertwined strategies, one regional and one global, advance this goal. We believe that by bridging grounded knowledge and initiatives to change global and cross-national systems, we can increase the likelihood that on-the-ground progress toward agroecological transformation will be supported rather than blocked by global policies, funding flows, and research norms and agendas.advance this goal:

Strategy 1: Accelerate local and regional food systems transformation by scaling co-created agroecological knowledge and practice.

Strategy 2: Influence global and cross-national funding flows, policies, and research norms to enable agroecological transformation.

The CRFS is guided by eight principles: inclusion, genuine collaboration, agroecological transformation, contextualization, farmer-researcher co-creation, research for the agroecological impact, values coherence, and systemic coherence. These principles guide the project work at local levels, in regional communities of practice, and through our program-wide global efforts.

In addition to principles the program has used a Theory of Change  (ToC) to represent the ways in which we intend to contribute to better livelihoods, productivity, nutrition, environmental sustainability, rural vibrancy, and equity for farming communities. The theory of change helps us identify funding strategies at the project, regional, and program levels; identify research priorities and appropriate partners; and determine the lens through which to evaluate our work. It also provides a unified framework to understand how the CRFS’s research outputs and grantee support processes combine to create impact.

We continually test, revise, and refine this theory of change to both improve our own programming as well as that of our grantees, and to use what we learn to leverage greater resources for communities. We will do so again as relates to our new goal and strategies.  Grantees are asked to develop explicit theory of change documents. The program and project theory of change documents are continually utilized and refined.