Thank you for helping us celebrate our 15th Anniversary in 2024!
Last year, we celebrated 15 years of Hunger Free Colorado being both a collaborator and a disruptor, focused on transforming systems to make them more equitable and just. Working with community leaders and hundreds of partner organizations, we have led powerful change in SNAP, child nutrition programs and the charitable food system to center community voice and promote food justice.
We invite you to learn more about what we accomplished over this significant milestone, our vision for the future, how you can get involved, and ways to support us to ensure we can continue to build community power to drive transformational change.
Help us Achieve Food Justice in Colorado
Ways to get involved as we look to the future!
- Make a donation to help us ensure every Coloradan has equitable access to nutritious, culturally relevant food. No amount is too small (or too large) as every gift makes a difference!
- Sign up to be an advocate. Join us in our fight to ensure the long-term success of Healthy School Meals for All and stay up-to-date on other important state and federal policies.
- Follow us on social media for stories and highlights of our impact over the last 15 years and counting!
Hunger Free Colorado has always relied on the support of community advocates, partners and generous donors who helped ensure that we could continue to make progress toward our goal of ending hunger by re-imagining our food systems to achieve food justice. It takes all of us working together to make progress.
Our Vision
Our north star towards ending hunger is the pursuit of racial justice and food sovereignty. Through successful community-driven policy and systems change, including the ground-breaking passage of Healthy School Meals for All, we have shown a path forward based on building community power to drive transformational change. Only through collectively re-imagining and re-shaping our food systems to dismantle systemic racism and center community voice and power can we achieve our goal of food justice.
OUR STORY: HISTORY AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
SNAP POLICY
As the largest federal nutrition program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) can make a huge impact towards ending hunger, but only if it is fully accessible. From our very first year, Hunger Free Colorado has been focused on fixing inequities in access to SNAP and working to boost historically insufficient benefit levels to allow families to obtain healthy, culturally relevant food.
Through legislation to establish the state’s first SNAP Outreach plan, state and federal advocacy, and assisting families with SNAP application assistance, we’ve been able to help move our state from only 42% of likely eligible households participating in SNAP in 2009 to 78% in 2022.
SNAP OUTREACH
Our statewide, multilingual Food Resource Hotline and Mobile Outreach team directly provides SNAP application assistance and additional food resource navigation to thousands of Coloradans each year. With our SNAP PEAS (Partners Engaged in Application Services) program, we support and train more than 54 trusted community organizations across the state to provide SNAP application assistance and foster sharing of best practices.
Through these strategies and a listening-centered, relational and trust-based approach, we are able to overcome barriers in accessing benefits for clients across the state, including immigrants and refugees, older adults, people with disabilities, the unhoused, students and rural communities.
FOOD SOVEREIGNTY
Our work within the charitable food system has been rooted in the concept of food sovereignty – that communities should be able to shape the types of food they have access to, how those foods are sourced and produced, and how they are distributed. We passed legislation in 2018 to establish the Food Pantry Assistance Grant so food pantries could purchase the fresh and culturally relevant foods that their communities wanted. We also started a Farm-to-Food Pantry Initiative to connect food pantries and farmers, led by Regional Food Coordinators across the state that understand the unique needs and offerings of their communities.
Our work has transformed the charitable food system to be more community-centered and local food system-focused and we’re now building on that success to support communities in re-envisioning school meals.
RACIAL JUSTICE
Racial justice has become a core guiding principle for our work. To achieve food justice, we must address the impacts of systemic racism that are built into our economic structure and food systems and create barriers for immigrants and communities of color in accessing nutritious, culturally relevant food. Efforts have included federal advocacy against a “public charge” rule change that led to immigrants rejecting nutrition programs for which they were eligible, a 2020 Summit on Immigrant Food Security, and a promotora initiative in partnership with 17 Latinx immigrant-serving groups to promote child nutrition programs.
We continue to be focused on centering BIPOC communities and BIPOC-led organizations in our SNAP Outreach, organizing and advocacy.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
We’re committed to organizing communities to build power that drives transformational policy change. In 2013, we started Hunger Through My Lens, a project to provide those with firsthand experience of hunger a platform to share their stories. In 2019, we launched a community council to amplify the voices and leadership skills of people around the state to be influential advocates for food justice in Colorado. Finally in 2021, we established our Community Organizing team with work centered on the intersection of food sovereignty, racial justice, and transformational organizing.
Rooted in local action and community power but strengthened through collective statewide organizing, we are driving transformational policy and systems change to achieve food justice.
HEALTHY SCHOOL MEALS FOR ALL
Throughout our organizational history, we have pursued bold policy change rooted in our ambition not just to alleviate hunger but to end it. Born out of conversations with parents, students, farmers, cafeteria workers and other advocates, Hunger Free Colorado spearheaded a community-driven campaign to pass Healthy School Meals for All (HSMA) in 2022 to provide all public-school students access to free, nutritious, locally sourced and culturally relevant school meals. Led by a grassroots, primarily BIPOC Steering Committee, community played a central role in shaping the policy and leading advocacy efforts.
Through this approach, the campaign achieved the successful passage of Proposition FF with 57% support, including 82% support from Latinx voters and majority support even in historically conservative counties like El Paso.
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