Historic partnership forged to address Native food crisis

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) announced today its partnership with the Corporation for National and Community Service and the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative (IFAI) to create a cadre of “Native Food Sovereignty Fellows.” The 21 initial fellows will be AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers working in teams in 10 low-resource Native American communities to establish and stabilize food sovereignty efforts, food systems, and tribal economies that build economic opportunities around food and agriculture.

As an initiative of its Seeds of Native Health campaign to improve Native American nutrition and food access, the SMSC is providing a $200,000 gift to fund the cost-share for VISTA members’ living allowance in the first year of the program. This represents the first time in VISTA’s 52-year history in which a tribe is providing funding to deploy VISTA members nationally.

“There is a nutritional health crisis in Indian Country, and its leading cause is the lack of access to healthy, affordable food. This partnership offers a new model to address food access problems at the tribal level,” said SMSC Chairman Charles R. Vig. “Our tribe is excited to support the work of AmeriCorps VISTA and IFAI to recruit and place teams of volunteers with the training, creativity, commitment, and strong work ethic needed to assist tribes achieve better food access.”

The VISTA members will provide much-needed grassroots capacity combined with national intertribal assistance to reduce the number of poor and food-insecure communities in Indian Country. Preliminary discussions are underway with 10 tribal communities in Alaska, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Washington.

AmeriCorps VISTA, operated by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency, is the national service program established specifically to help alleviate poverty. Founded as Volunteers in Service to America in 1965 as the domestic version of the Peace Corps, VISTA taps the skills, talents and passion of more than 8,000 Americans annually to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations or local government agencies to carry out programs that tackle poverty.

“We are so proud to support this culturally competent and innovative approach to addressing specific tribal community needs, by harnessing the organizational support available through our partner, the University of Arkansas’ Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative and the generosity of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux community,” said AmeriCorps VISTA Director Max Finberg.

The Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas School of Law will recruit, train, deploy and supervise the work of these VISTA volunteers. IFAI was created by Dean Stacy Leeds at the University of Arkansas School of Law – the first female Native American law school dean in the country. It focuses on multi-disciplinary research, service and education in support of Native communities. The IFAI director is Janie Simms Hipp, a former advisor to the Secretary of U.S. Department of Agriculture. IFAI’s work encompasses groundbreaking tribal food code development, feeding program analysis, national food systems scans, and related projects. Each year, IFAI also hosts the Leadership Summit for Native Youth in Food and Agriculture, a 10-day educational event to build skills in food systems development and learn how food and agriculture policy impacts their tribal communities. To date, nearly 300 native students have participated in the summit.

“Tribes across the country are struggling to access healthy food and develop their own food systems,” said Dean Leeds. “The SMSC has been a longstanding leader in support of tribal sovereignty and now is the national leader working on improving Native nutritional health. Their support of AmeriCorps VISTA is critical to tackling hunger and food insecurity and building strong Native food systems in Indian Country. This new effort will take these commitments one step further and support the deployment of VISTA recruits within tribal communities to gain on-the-ground experience and assist tribes in their work towards healthy food access.”