Global Alliance for the Future of Food

The Challenge

• The Global Alliance for the Future of Food launched with a vision of transforming the world’s food systems to be more just and sustainable. With 20+ organizations involved and massive global issues to tackle, the collaborative needed to define its strategy, priorities, and voice.

The Partners

• Over 20 foundations from ten countries working on different dimensions of food systems

The Outcome

• With strategy support, landscape analysis, and facilitation from Meridian, the Global Alliance and its members defined their vision, guiding principles, core elements of their strategy, and priority areas for influence. This continues to guide the Global Alliance’s actions over a decade later.

Project Overview

Over 20 foundations from ten countries—each with diverse interests and expertise spanning health, food, conservation, cultural diversity, and community wellbeing—came together in 2012 to transform global food systems with an eye for sustainability. Meridian provides strategic support to this collaborative, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, by helping its members understand opportunities for impact, articulate their collective vision, and identify priorities for the future.

The Global Alliance was interested in exploring opportunities to expand charitable investments in agroecological approaches, “true cost accounting” (i.e., recognizing externalities), health, and food systems’ relationship to climate change. As a trusted third party with a track record of successfully supporting multi-foundation initiatives, Meridian helped the group cement its unique strategic vision and claim a valuable role within the agriculture and food systems funding landscape.

We also helped the Alliance’s members identify funding gaps and opportunities for impact within their shared portfolios. For example, we produced a landscape assessment that captured their strategies, geographies, and objectives, alongside those of other key food and ag funders. We also authored a report on Climate Change and Food Systems that identified key recommendations about how food systems could better address climate change. This report was profiled in op-eds in The Guardian and Al Jazeera and published as a peer-reviewed article in Cambridge University Press.

Today, the Global Alliance continues to bolster global efforts to transform food and agriculture for future generations. The Global Alliance’s successes are a model for other multi-stakeholder foundation initiatives that aim to drive systemic change.