By Kimberly Della Donna
Kimberly Della Donna is the Farm to School Director at Georgia Organics. Kimberly has always been interested in local foods systems and distribution, and finds the challenges Early Care and Education (ECE) providers have finding local food supply chains especially intriguing. She thinks that seeking local sourcing solutions for early care providers seems like a good strategy for job security.
Two years ago, Georgia Organics embarked on a research project we optimistically called our “ECE Local Sourcing Solutions” project. If you’re an early care and education provider struggling to find sources of local produce, you know just how optimistic that title is!
Together with a researcher from GSU and another researcher from UGA, I set out to identify all the possible sources an early care provider in Georgia could tap for local food. We reached out to over thirty distributors and farmers that we thought definitely or possibly distributed local fresh food in Georgia. We were disappointed to only confirm and interview 15 sources, but it was exciting to create a directory of those sources specifically for ECE providers.
The Local Food Sourcing Directory listings include definitions of “local food,” as well as information on how each distributor identifies the grower of the food in their catalog. We tried to put all the information a provider needs to choose the vendor who fits with their local purchasing goals.
Our next steps were to connect at least four of those vendors to ECE providers with local food sourcing goals so we could follow their progress of the purchasing relationship and note their process. We hoped to document their challenges and successes and create models to make it easier for other ECE purchasers to set up new, local purchasing programs. We never imagined it would be so challenging! Besides the challenge of finding the right geographical matches, providers who could meet distributors minimum orders, and farmers who had the time to even talk about direct purchasing relationships, there was COVID-19- which slammed the breaks on our project for over four months while upending supply chains and ECE environments. Needless to say, we didn’t find a long list of “ECE Local Sourcing Solutions”.
Sourcing Solutions Best Practices
Sourcing Solutions Recommendations for Support Organizations
In the end, we were able to document four successful ECE local purchasing programs from different regions in Georgia. As those of us who work in early care know, there are so many different sizes, shapes, and styles of early care environments that one- size will never fit all when it comes to local purchasing. This short report shares some best practices that most providers seeking to create a local purchasing program can use as a guide, though.
There are also some common challenges (too many challenges!) to be aware of when setting your expectations.
There are even recommendations for agencies and organizations who support ECE providers.
My favorite parts are the “Success Stories”, which share the innovative and inspiring ways that four brilliant business owners have created programs that support the health and wellness of Georgia’s little eaters, those who care for them, and their communities.
Read the Farm to Early Care Sourcing Strategies infographic report here