The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership connects California’s food-system and emergency workers to feed people after devastating fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
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The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership connects California’s food-system and emergency workers to feed people after devastating fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
August 26, 2025
Members of the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership take a hike together as part of their May 2025 convening in Mendocino County. (Photo courtesy of The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership)
In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California burned more than 36,000 acres and a large part of suburban Santa Rosa, forcing around 100,000 people to evacuate their homes. Grocery stores, restaurants, and farmers’ markets had to close, and because farmers were unable to get their crops to these vendors, the produce languished on their farms. Meanwhile, displaced residents who had lost their homes and jobs suddenly found themselves struggling to find food.
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The local food system was not set up for emergencies. This realization was catalyzing for Julia Van Soelen Kim, a social scientist and food systems advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Napa County, who saw the great abundance available yet no systems to get it to people in need.
“The event magnified and intensified the inequalities in food access and the abundance that our local food system could provide in emergencies,” Van Soelen Kim says.
In typical emergency response larger relief organizations—such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Red Cross, Salvation Army, and state entities—take charge of large-scale feeding. They will use food that might be locally or regionally available from larger chains, but not food sourced directly from area farmers—and there’s no set way for these farmers to get their food to people in their communities.
What’s more, when outside organizations without the proper connections try to start moving food from farms to food banks, it often doesn’t work, Van Soelen Kim says. “They’re just picking up the food and don’t know how the farmer is going to get paid,” she says. While there is a role for these large-scale feeding organizations, she says, “we just want to make sure that they have access to local foods.”
To try to improve the system, Van Soelen Kim created the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership to connect emergency management and local food-system professionals. The goal of the partnership is to enable the distribution of locally produced food in the wake of disaster. For both fields, this represents a novel collaboration.
Julia Van Soelen Kim, founder of the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership, leads a workshop for food system and emergency response workers at the Partnership’s May 2025 convening. (Photo courtesy of The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership)
Just north of the San Francisco Bay area, the landscape consists of small fishing towns set amid a dramatic coastline, where waves crash against craggy cliffs. Here, the vineyards and orchards of Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties transition into the forests and tribal lands of Humboldt and Del Norte counties.
While the region is popular with tourists thanks to its coastal location, wineries, and redwoods, the North Coast is very rural. Aside from the communities just outside the Bay Area, the median household income is well below the state average.
Alongside the ever-present threat of earthquakes, the region is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Fires are a worry not just during the hot, dry summers, but year-round, and the coastal landscape is prone to landslides during heavy rains.
Nationwide, climate disasters are increasingly forcing communities to deal with large-scale emergencies, like the floods of Hurricane Helene, the wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles, and the floods in Central Texas after intense rainfall from Tropical Storm Barry. In such emergencies, food distribution is a major concern, and the model that the partnership is developing could serve as a solution across the country.
Suzanne Grady, program director at Petaluma Bounty, a food aid program and emergency food hub, says developing a resilient local food system prior to emergencies helps local food find its way to people after disaster.
“It just seems that we have been set up to rely too heavily upon groups and agencies that come in, potentially flood the area with resources that may or may not be needed, and then leave sometimes just as quickly,” Grady says. “It actually interferes with the local recovery efforts.”
While these relief organizations are necessary for disaster response writ large, she says, if there’s a resilient food system in place, the incoming groups could tap into that local system already in operation.
Boxes of shiitake mushrooms that Mycality Mushrooms donated to survivors of the 2022 earthquakes in Humboldt, CA. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)
Typically, those who work in food systems—farmers, food policy council members, food hub coordinators, farmers’ market managers, and food pantry managers—rarely, if ever, cross professional paths with emergency management workers. The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership is meant to change that, creating a way for these different regional entities to meet, connect, and strategize.
The majority of the $1.5 million in funding for the project comes from the USDA’s Regional Food Systems Partnership Program, and the rest consists of local grants and matching funds from regional organizations and community foundations. As of this writing, the USDA funding has remained intact, despite the administration’s shift in priorities.
In mid-August, in fact, Van Soelen Kim received news that the program received a no-cost extension from the USDA, meaning that instead of having to scale back or end their activities, they have one more year to carry out their work using what’s remaining of their existing funding.
“We have been set up to rely too heavily upon groups and agencies that come in, potentially flood the area with resources that may or may not be needed, and then leave, sometimes just as quickly. It actually interferes with the local recovery efforts.”
Van Soelen Kim and her colleagues are taking full advantage if the extension by focusing on three goals: building a “community of practice” among emergency management and daily food-operations professionals to collaborate on emergency feeding plans; establishing the technical assistance needed for food distribution systems to pivot after disaster; and shifting local government policy to incorporate local food distribution as central to emergency plans.
Van Soelen Kim has seen almost immediate results from the community of practice goal in particular. Partnership members meet by virtual calls quarterly and in person annually. While 250 people are on the member list, typically around 75 people participate in each meeting. Together, they discuss topics around local food systems and disaster response and build relationships with each other.
“This North Coast Regional Partnership has opened the doors for a lot of relationships and networking that is invaluable to the development of this local group,” says Robert Sataua, the emergency food response coordinator for Food for People, Humboldt County’s food bank. “It’s not something that’s a metric that you can put on paper, but I think the momentum is there.”
Emergency food boxes outside the Family Resource Center of the Redwoods food bank during California’s Smith Complex Fire in 2023. The white board shows the number of emergency food boxes distributed to rural communities in Del Norte County. (Photo credit: Iya Mahan)
Most of Humbolt County, which is rural and rugged outside the port city of Eureka, is susceptible to disasters like fires and winter storms. Local producers raise and harvest livestock, dairy, a diverse array of crops, and oysters, yet a 2019 U.C. Davis report shows that one in five Humboldt County residents lives in a low-income area with limited access to food, especially fresh food. During emergencies, disparate relief organizations worked in a vacuum and most food came from outside Humboldt County.
Sataua, networking with colleagues in other organizations through the partnership, helped develop a multi-agency feeding plan to supplement regional and community disaster response. In Humboldt County, the new plan lays out strategies and guidance that will minimize duplication, coordinate resources, and deliver food and water efficiently.
With this plan, food systems and emergency management folks get on the same page before disaster strikes. Coordinated preparation helps farmers sell their food in a disaster and residents to more easily find out where and how to access it.
Iya Mahan is the program director for the Del Norte and Tribal Lands Community Food Council (DNATL Food Council), an organization that strategizes to make the food system more local and equitable in her community. Her work with the Partnership inspired the creation of an emergency feeding task force for Del Norte County, another rural, rugged area, on the Oregon border.
The task force—which involved multiple parties including the Office of Emergency Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, two county food banks, and tribal communities—created a Multi-Agency Disaster Feeding Plan (MADFP), and now meets monthly to coordinate and discuss emergency feeding efforts and ways to strengthen resilience.
The plan is more than a document, Mahan says. “It’s a community-built roadmap for action. Developed by local organizations and government partners working side by side, it has strengthened relationships, clarified roles, and prepared us to respond quickly in a crisis.”
The relationships that members are developing are key, she says. “When something happens, we know who to call, and we know how to communicate with them—we’ve already built the relationship. So, we’re seeing a lot of strength in that soft infrastructure of relationship building.”
One example is the relationship between the DNATL Food Council and the school district’s nutrition services director, Julie Bjorkstrand.
“When something happens, we know who to call, and we know how to communicate with them—we’ve already built the relationship. We’re seeing a lot of strength in that soft infrastructure of relationship building.”
That relationship showed its strength during the Smith River Complex Fire in August 2023, when the food bank, along with many homes in the area, lost power. The fairgrounds that was serving as a shelter had a hard time to keeping up with the demand.
“[Bjorkstrand] really stepped up,” says Mahan, refrigerating all the food from the food bank at the school district kitchen—and then going beyond. “She actually created a team that cooked and fed everybody at the shelter—[using] the school kitchens that she uses to serve 1,800 students breakfast and lunch every day.”
Bjorkstrand’s nimble response shows there’s room in a local food system to respond to disaster. The school district’s nutrition services team, which is actively involved in the task force, has now integrated lessons from the Smith River Fire Complex into the plan and laid out how the school district can help after another disaster.
The partnership is helping organizations work through the more difficult aspects of creating localized food systems, which can serve communities on a regular basis—and activate in new ways after disaster.
Humboldt County volunteer Jennifer Bell helps pack Harvest Boxes in 2020 for distribution during the pandemic. The boxes are a creation of the North Coast Growers’ Association food hub. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)
Many Humboldt County business leaders revealed in surveys that they found building local and regional food systems to be a clunky process even in blue-sky times, says Megan Kenney, director of cooperative distribution for the county’s North Coast Growers’ Association (NCGA). In surveys distributed to local businesses, including local restaurants, food trucks, and food vendors, “everyone really wanted more local food,” Kenney says. “There just wasn’t an easy way to get it.”
The 100-member growers’ association supported the county’s farmers by coordinating farmers’ markets—but it didn’t distribute food. Now, thanks to participation in the North Coast Emergency Partnership, the group offers a food hub and a multi-farm CSA, too.
Kenney credits the connections and ideas she developed in the partnership for the development of the Harvest Hub in 2020. To make it easy for food buyers like restaurants and grocery stores to buy local food, the hub created an online marketplace that mimics a traditional distribution system.
Farmers drop off their local harvests at the cold storage facility in the NCGA warehouse, a key component of the food hub. From there, hub vehicles deliver the food to customers.
Currently, the hub provides food for 34 school sites, 11 restaurants, and nine community organizations that include two food banks, four tribes, and two community centers.
“What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish?”
Though the hub serves the county year round, it has already proven essential after disasters. During the 2021 Monument Fire, NCGA put together no-cook boxes with produce and locally made soap for evacuees and people without power. Following a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in December 2022 and during subsequent winter storms, the hub collected donations from farmers for bulk food distributions.
And during the Smith River Complex fires in August 2023, its members sent food to Crescent City in Del Norte County, proving that the Partnership not only fosters cross-sectoral collaboration, but cross-county support as well. On-site at the hub’s warehouse, they’ve helped to coordinate emergency supply storage.
Additionally, to get around blocked roads after disaster, NCGA—with help from a USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) grant and California Jobs First grants—is planning to establish “cooler nodes,” food drop-off sites with solar-powered coolers, in isolated communities.
During regular times, the nodes can keep food at safe temperatures until hub employees make the rounds for pickup and redistribution. After a disaster, they can serve as lifelines, providing a place for farmers to drop food to be integrated into an emergency feeding operation.
Farmers would still get paid through the same networks, but the recipients of the food would be food pantries or emergency providers like the Red Cross. They could use the same system and codes for the coolers to access food without having to have extra staff on hand.
Daniel Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program and co-director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, has found time and again in his research that connections among local people are important to building resilient communities.
“These bottom-up social infrastructure spaces [such as a food hub or community garden] give us the space where we can have agency,” Aldrich says. “The social connection, social capital, always tries to build these ideas of knowledge, of collective action.”
In Humboldt County, volunteers prepare Harvest Boxes for distribution during the 2023 holidays. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)
Another important aspect to resilience-building: translating the bottom-up social infrastructure made possible by the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership to the larger feeding entities. Van Soelen Kim saw this in action at the group’s most recent annual convening on May 13.
The event brought in 75 attendees from all the counties in the partnership, representing organizations including the Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, and the California Department of Social Services Disaster Services. It even brought in state and national representatives from large-scale food distribution and disaster response groups. The important factor wasn’t just that these organizations attended; it’s that their participation allowed for personal introductions.
“All the representatives from these large feeding entities . . . expressed, ‘If you need us, pick up the phone and call us,’” says Van Soelen Kim. “That kind of open-door approach was great to see because before, no one knew even where the front door was, and now they have an actual person to call.”
These connections matter, says Aldrich, of the Global Resilience Institute. “What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish? If you’re alone, if you’re isolated, if you’re not engaged with other people, it’s much harder.”
Resilience, he emphasizes, is about human-to-human interaction, which the Partnership provides.
While the group has not replicated its work in other communities quite yet, organizers have started to disseminate information about the project at scholarly conferences and hope to begin training practitioners in other regions, Van Soelen Kim says.
With an upheaval in federal emergency assistance funding, Aldrich believes that communities need to step up for themselves. Traditionally, he says, we think about disaster response as having two pillars: government assistance provided by FEMA and the state, and insurance provided by the market.
“But the reality is what we see right now—both in California and with the ongoing mess in D.C.—is, it is really a triangle, not two pillars. The third part is community. What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish?”
As the North Coast heads into the driest parts of the season and the Tubbs Fire’s eighth anniversary, Van Soelen Kim says the members of the North Coast Emergency Food System are increasingly appreciative of their group’s innovative approach.
“With time, we’ve found what we’re doing here on the North Coast is really special,” she says. “New people keep showing up to the conversation [and] we continue learning together about how layered and complex the emergency food system is. By collaborating in this way, we’re creating something unique that isn’t being done elsewhere.”
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