“Getting stuff done”: Co-design and co-production in response to food program cuts in Michigan’s Western Upper Peninsula

This presentation shares preliminary findings from a cross-sector collaboration of local food partners in Michigan’s Western Upper Peninsula who are organizing a collective response to 2025’s pauses and cuts to state and federal food systems programs. The region’s local food systems efforts had only recently begun to secure increased federal investment through federal programs and grants such as SNAP-Ed, SARE, EQIP, farm to school, and institutional food purchasing, as well as Michigan’s 10 Cents a Meal program. The success of these preliminary efforts had caught the attention of civic leaders, inspiring them to expand their view of community food systems beyond traditional social safety net programs and to integrate community food systems infrastructure within regional economic development as well as risk and hazard mitigation plans. The federal and state funding pauses and cuts jeopardized these collaborations, threatening trust as future project plans stagnated. In response, a team led by a local farmer and a local farmers market collective board member, with support from the researcher-presenter, convened food systems partners to co-design an intervention. Informed by earlier grassroots networks established during the COVID-19 pandemic, their participatory approach brings together those working at the intersections food production, health, nutrition, education, purchasing, and planning, as well as local funders, to leverage existing knowledge and prioritize investment in new modes of service delivery. This co-production process contributes to participative and epistemic justice as rural residents respond and redesign local food systems through their own diversity of experiences and knowledge. This process also directly contributes to rural food justice as it confronts white supremacist narratives of scarcity and reactivity to instead engage rural residents as active agents of place-based research and transformative change.