Communities for Future. Good food for all Campaign

Community Pathways to Food Justice, Regeneration and Rights in Europe

About the Campaign

Communities for Future: Good Food for All is ECOLISE’s food policy advocacy campaign mobilising community-led initiatives, civil society networks, and allies around a shared vision for just and sustainable food systems in Europe.

Grounded in ECOLISE’s policy positioning paper Reclaiming the Future of Food: Community Pathways to Resilience, Justice and Regeneration, the campaign connects lived community practices with European policy debates. It advances concrete recommendations that strengthen local and regional food systems, support agroecological and regenerative practices, and recognise food as a right rather than a commodity.

The campaign also builds momentum around the Right to Food European Citizens’ Initiative, inviting communities across Europe to affirm food as a collective and political responsibility.Taking place during the International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026, Communities for Future also highlights the transformative role of women farmers, peasants, and gender-diverse actors who sustain territories, nurture biodiversity, and strengthen community resilience across Europe.

Upcoming events:

Farming With Nature – Regeneration, Livelihoods, and a New Social Contract for Europe’s Farmers & Peasants

7 May, 14:00–15:30 CET – Register here

This workshop explores how agroecological and regenerative approaches strengthen both ecosystems and rural livelihoods, positioning peasants and small-scale producers as key stewards of biodiversity, soil health, and climate resilience. It highlights agroecology, biodiversity-based and soil-restoring farming, regenerative techniques, peasant-led initiatives, community-supported pastoralism, and approaches to animal wellbeing grounded in ecological responsibility.

The discussion will also address the need for a renewed social contract that recognises farmers and peasants as ecological and social actors whose work sustains territories, communities, and future generations.

Past events: 

Reclaiming Local Food Economies – Community Wealth, Territorial Resilience, and the Future of Food in Europe

7 April | 13:00–14:30 CET | Online Workshop

Event details | Event recording

Food as Community Wealth: Beyond the Neoliberal Market
While the current economic system treats food as a global commodity, a radical shift toward localized, resilient food economies is flourishing. From regional food belts to cooperative networks, community-led initiatives prove the future of food lies in territorial strength and democratic ownership, not extractive supply chains.

The Architecture of Resilience
Relocalizing food is a collective, future-oriented strategy for the just food systems of tomorrow. As showcased in the third workshop of the Communities for Future: Good Food for All campaign, this transition requires building new infrastructures of care and cooperation. To achieve territorial resilience, we must shift away from extractive economies that export raw materials while importing the majority of their food. We must address:

• The Infrastructure Gap: Building physical assets like logistics centers and cooperative canneries to scale local processing.
• The Relational Burden: Recognizing the invisible work of building trust. As Christian Jonet (CATL) noted: “Beyond the projects, the real work has always been relational. Trust takes years to build, and it can be lost very quickly.”
• The Extraction of Wealth: Replacing models where profit leaves the community with those that keep money circulating locally.

From Commodity to Public Good
The right to food is a cornerstone of a sustainable society. By leveraging public procurement, community-led initiatives transform food into an essential public service. This ensures that large-scale institutional demand—from education to healthcare—becomes a stable engine for local regenerative production.

The barrier is often not a lack of resources, but an economic design prioritizing capital over people. Fabio Villani (SCAN) highlighted the immense potential for change

It’s technically possible to provide 78% of the food we use by growing, processing, and distributing it here.

Scaling Through Community Wealth Building
Systemic change requires anchoring our food future in Community Wealth Building. This necessitates a focus on the mandatory role of anchor institutions, which hold a legal obligation to leverage their economic power to shift the tide through:

• Democratic Ownership: Supporting cooperatives and food councils that give citizens a say.
• Fair Procurement: Directing public spending toward local producers to build regional capacity.
• Economic Reorientation: Shifting from profit-seeking toward bioregional self-sufficiency.

As Martin Avila (ECON) stated

Community Wealth Building seeks to create an economy which doesn’t create problems that need to be solved.

Institutionalizing the Right to Food
The path forward bridges the gap between grassroots practice, territorial decision-making and EU advocacy. The Right to Food is a human right and a collective responsibility. Transitioning toward relocalized systems means treating food as the vital infrastructure it is. Let us build an economy that fosters health and well-being through territorial resilience and the reclamation of our food systems as a public good.

The Europe We Want: Women, Food and Communities – What Pathways Toward Sustainability?

9 March 2026 | 16 – 17:30 CET | Online workshop

Event details | Event recording

Food is Political: How Women Transform Europe’s Food Future
While industrial agriculture prioritizes profit, a localized and resilient radical transformation is taking root across Europe. From the “Omas for the Future” in Germany to permaculture networks serving as war-time refuges in Ukraine, women are proving that food security isn’t just a technical challenge: it is a political act of care.

The Invisible Backbone of the Soil
For too long, the labour of women in our food systems has been relegated to unpaid care work or invisible agricultural toil. This isn’t just a labour issue, but one of equity and justice, as well as structural barrier to sustainability. We cannot build resilient and fair food systems in Europe while women face:

• Systemic Erasure: Their productive work in the fields often remains unrecognized and uncompensated.
• Barriers to Ownership: They have limited access to land and decision-making power, which stifles the transition to agroecology.
• The Time Poverty Trap: The double burden of survival and domestic labour limits the political agency of women farmers and peasants.

From Survival to Transformation
The right to food is the right to life. As highlighted by Iryna Kazakova from Permaculture Ukraine, women aren’t just participants in the food system: they have the capacity to transform it entirely. By leaning into ecological stewardship practices like permaculture, slow food and community supported agriculture (CSA), women are already championing both ecological and social impact over bottom-line margins.

To move from mushrooming projects to policy and structural changes, we must anchor our food future in four central pillars to achieve gender equality in agriculture and the sustainability of our food systems:

1. Recognition: Making the invisible labour of women visible
2. Redistribution: Balancing the burden of work between women and men.
3. Representation: Ensuring women have a seat at the tables where policy is written and decisions are made.
4. Just Remuneration: Ensuring that feeding the world sustainably provides a decent wage.

A Call for Radical Alliances

The path forward isn’t found in silos. It requires a coalition of responsibilities to bridge the gap between scientific research and policy-relevant local community knowledge and practices, as well as linking Ukrainian resilience practices with EU-wide networks.

We aren’t just talking about agriculture: we are talking about the indivisibility of human rights and about good food as a human right. It is time to treat our food systems as the essential ecological public services they are, rather than mere commodities.

Food Democracy in Practice: Commons Governance, Bioregional Partnerships, and the Right to Food

11 February 2026 | 17:00–18:30 CET | Online workshop

Event details | Event recording

The first workshop of the Communities for Future campaign brought together community-led initiatives, solidarity economy actors, and food justice advocates to explore how food democracy is enacted in practice and how it connects to EU-level advocacy. Grounded in ECOLISE’s policy positioning paper Reclaiming the Future of Food, the session examined how everyday practices of participatory governance, cooperation, and rights-claiming reshape food systems from the ground up.

In the practice-sharing segment, speakers demonstrated that food democracy is not an abstract principle but a lived political process. Janelle Conn, experienced urban food grower, Project Lead (FFF) and Network Connector at ECOLISE, reflected on urban gardening initiatives and grassroots solutions already being implemented in cities, showing how shared access to land, collective decision-making, and neighbourhood-based food growing create local infrastructures of food sovereignty. Dražen Šimleša, long-time activist with the Green Network of Activist Groups (ZMAG) in Croatia, highlighted the importance of integrating grassroots practice with policy advocacy in Croatia, arguing that solidarity economy initiatives must be able to translate lived alternatives into institutional influence. Ramona Duminicioiu, a Romanian peasant, spoke about access to justice as a key dimension of food democracy, drawing from the experience of Eco Ruralis in challenging harmful agricultural policies and defending peasants’ rights.

The roundtable discussion deepened these reflections by addressing the political urgency behind the Right to Food European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). Speakers pointed to a structural gap at EU level: while the right to food is recognised in international human rights law, it is not structurally embedded within European governance. The ECI was framed as a democratic instrument capable of confronting this gap, creating a formal mechanism through which citizens can demand policy coherence across agriculture, trade, environment, and social policy. Food was repeatedly framed during the discussion not as a commodity to be regulated primarily through market logic, but as a basic condition for life and dignity. As such, it cannot be treated solely as a profit-making activity, but must be governed as a public good and a collective responsibility. Building a broad alliance from the outset was described as essential, precisely because this structural gap cannot be addressed by isolated actors.

Participants also reflected on what the ECI makes politically possible. Beyond its formal legal implications, it was described as both an intervention and an organising process that shifts narratives and builds collective leverage across sectors. As Almudena García Sastre noted:

“Even beyond the legal outcome, the ECI process itself builds political pressure, public awareness, and accountability. It strengthens alliances that will outlast the campaign.”

In this sense, the Right to Food is not only about institutional recognition, but about consolidating long-term political momentum for rights-based food systems in Europe and connecting grassroots intervention with structural policy change.

When asked what kinds of support are most needed to make the ECI politically effective, the emphasis was clear: mobilisation, legitimacy, and coordination across networks. Dražen Šimleša highlighted the importance of mobilisation capacity:

“We need organisations and networks to activate their constituencies, translate the campaign into local contexts, and embed it in ongoing struggles.”

Ramona Duminicioiu stressed the role of legitimacy and visibility:

“The more diverse actors publicly endorse and disseminate the Right to Food, the stronger its political weight becomes. This is about collective responsibility.”

Katerina Boucoyannis reflected on the importance of coordination across networks:

“ECOLISE and its members are uniquely positioned to connect community-led practices with European advocacy. Our role is to weave alliances that make the Right to Food visible across sectors.”

The discussion concluded with a shared commitment to ensure that the Right to Food becomes not only a policy demand, but a collective political responsibility enacted across territories, organisations, and institutional spaces.

Upcoming Opportunities to Contribute

We are currently seeking members and allies who would like to share concrete practices from their communities (5-minute inputs) and/or contribute as speakers in the roundtable discussions for the upcoming workshops. Now is the time to turn community practice into political momentum. If you would like to contribute to Communities for Future: Good Food for All or to either of the upcoming events, express your interest and join the growing alliance working to make the Right to Food a lived reality across Europe. You can also contact us at policy@ecolise.eu.