This grantee profile is part of our EMS assessment report, “Our Stories, Our Commonwealth.” Read the executive summary or the full report for more information about Expand Massachusetts Stories. You can also visit our web page highlighting key information from our assessment.
The Hampshire County Food Policy Council launched in 2022, inspired by several years of intensive community engagement work to explore the root causes of food insecurity in the region. Conceived of as a resident-led coalition, the Food Policy Council set out to build a healthy, affordable, and resilient community-owned food system in Hampshire County. It was structured as a set of decentralized “Circles,” or community-comprised working groups, each charged with contributing to the Council’s overall mission but empowered with the autonomy and authority to develop and execute its own strategy.
From the outset, Council members saw storytelling as a powerful tool for challenging conventional narratives about who experiences food insecurity and why, and they devoted one of the original Circles to it.
Kristen Whitmore, a program manager at Collaborative Educational Services which helped incubate and continues to serve as the staffing and fiscal administrator for the Food Policy Council, recalls: “A couple of months after the Food Policy Council officially launched, I was sitting in the living room in a public housing complex in Northampton with a couple of community members that were getting really involved. And we were like, ‘We’ve launched, what are some of our projects going to be?’ One of the first things that came up was storytelling. This group was saying, ‘The conversations that we hear in the media, or even in broader public conversations in our communities, don’t really reflect the experiences that we’re having. They don’t feel like they resonate with what is going on in our lives even though the stories are often about us.’”
The group began imagining a project that would “lift up the stories of people with lived experience of food insecurity” in order to both build community and change the narrative about food — to, in Kristen’s words, “shift the conversation about why people struggle with food insecurity and what that experience is like. And not just the experiences of food insecurity, but the beautiful connections that people have with food that are so important to their culture and their celebrations and their family.”
As these conversations were beginning to take place, Kristen came across the call for applications for the 2022 cycle of Expand Massachusetts Stories. The application process provided members of the Food Policy Council’s Storytelling Circle with a timely platform to collectively hone their strategy and design an initial proof-of-concept project. They imagined building a digital repository of stories about food experiences and culture in Hampshire County.
When they were notified that they’d been awarded a grant, they were ready to hit the ground running. Circle members were trained in trauma-informed storytelling strategy with the Food Culture Collective and in oral history methodology with the Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History at the National Public Housing Museum. They launched a round of community workshops to introduce the project to the community. And then they invited community members to participate in oral history interviews with Circle members. They conducted 26 interviews, creating audio recordings of each. Through a collaborative editing process, the story recordings were assembled into an exhibit that was installed at the Forbes Library in the summer of 2024 and attended by community leaders and the state legislators who represent Hampshire County, and into a Community Story Archive website that lives on.
For many of the storytellers, being invited to share their experiences was powerful. Kristen says that simply being listened to by a fellow community member was validating. “A lot of the people that we interviewed are low income, and they don’t feel like their voices are heard very often. They don’t feel like their experiences around how they interact with systems are respected or valued. Just to be able to share that with somebody who is compassionate and interested was extremely affirming.” But she adds that the project’s impact on individual storytellers is only the beginning: “It is about that, but it’s not just about that. It’s also about uplifting a vision for the food system, and the world more broadly, that helps us to see a future, see a pathway forward. And to share that with our community in a way that invites their minds to open to the possibility that things could look different.”
“It is humanities- and culture-based work that is really the foundation of the types of systems change that we want.”
For the Food Policy Council, harnessing the power of storytelling to not just change the narrative, but to actually change policy, is the next step — one that is realistically in reach given the solid foundation they were able to lay with EMS’ support. The Storytelling Circle continues to meet weekly, and advocacy through storytelling has become a critical strategy used across the entire Council. As Kristen sums it up, “It is humanities- and culture-based work that is really the foundation of the type of systems change that we want. People’s hearts and minds are changed through this type of culture and humanities work, and that is the first step to changing a policy or a law.
