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Residents asked for fresh local produce, healthy prepared foods, and culturally relevant offerings. Seniors needed a way to get there. Others emphasized Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payment options, so families could use federal food benefits. And many described something harder to quantify: a market that felt like it belonged to the neighborhood, not another well-meaning promise about food access.

Kalloo is the founder of Victual Solutions, a nonprofit that helps food entrepreneurs find and grow opportunities across farmers’ markets and other sales channels. She is also a volunteer member of the Washington, D.C. Food Policy Council, a mayor-appointed advisory body created to broaden the voices shaping food policy decisions. Ward 7 Farmers Market is one example of that policy effort succeeding—of council advocacy converging with neighborhood outreach.

“Our approach is to glean from the community,” Kalloo said, “to create a market that represents the people it serves.”

Food policy councils, or FPCs, are roundtables found in hundreds of cities and regions across the country, bringing together public agencies, local advocates, and the people who grow, sell, serve, and distribute food. They occupy a hybrid space, connected to, though not always housed inside, government.

The councils are close enough to influence agencies and elected officials but broad enough to knit together many different elements of the local food system, from food access, agriculture, and small business to public health, procurement, and disaster relief.

Natalia Kalloo surveys the Ward 7 community in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Natalia Kalloo)

D.C. was a national leader in bringing that model into city hall. A 2014 law, implemented as Mayor Muriel Bowser took office, made the district the first municipality to establish a government-based FPC, along with a food policy director and an Office of Food Policy within D.C.’s Office of Planning.

The council and office established public forums, policy priorities, reports for city leaders, and cross-agency work on programs ranging from produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals to farmers’ market access and food-business support.

Twelve years later, Bowser has moved to dismantle the D.C. FPC, looking for ways to trim the district’s budget. In April, her FY 2027 Budget Support Act proposed repealing the statute and eliminating the council, director’s office, and three full-time positions for $413,000 in first-year savings.

After community food advocates testified against the cuts, the D.C. Council—the district’s legislative branch—moved to restore funding for the FPC. A final vote is scheduled for June 23, but the Office of Food Policy will remain unstaffed for at least the rest of the year.

While drastic, D.C. isn’t unique. Denver and New Haven, Connecticut, have spent the past year quietly thinning the staff and partner networks that turn local food needs into programs and emergency responses. Whether these cases add up to a national trend remains unclear, yet they reveal a common weakness: The municipal infrastructure that gives food policy a formal place in city government can be dismantled quickly when budgets tighten—and with little notice, because these offices rarely have the power to defend themselves.

At a moment when federal funding for local food work is getting cut, frozen, or canceled, these cities are weakening the very capacity they’ve built to absorb such shocks: the staff, relationships, and institutional memory that connect gaps to action.

The Ward 7 farmers’ market was shaped by that kind of work. In council-led meetings, organizers, vendors, and food-access advocates identified the barriers that keep markets from opening in low-access areas: confusing permits, limited funding, and a lack of technical support. Those conversations helped inform the district’s 2025 Farmers Market Support Amendment Act, which makes it easier to launch and sustain these ventures in underserved communities.

Without the council, Kalloo said, the city risks “losing a dedicated body regularly listening to diverse food entrepreneurs, [and] eliminat[ing] the ongoing advocacy that keeps small food businesses and food jobs visible in budget and policy conversations.”

SNAP cuts, climate shocks, and rising hunger are also piling pressure on local food systems, Kalloo adds. “Who will be our new champion?”

FPCs emerged in the 1980s in the absence of any formal “Department of Food,” to convene people working across the food chain—from production and distribution to public health, hunger relief, small business, and food waste—and coordinate work that otherwise fell between agencies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many shifted into crisis response, helping cities track service gaps, handle feeding logistics, and move food through systems that municipalities had never fully built.

Caroline Howe, who served as the D.C.’s food policy director from 2023 until late April of this year, described the office’s role as facilitating the council and its six working groups, producing food-systems research and plain-language legislative guides for the public, and convening agencies, nonprofits, and community members on food issues ranging from urban agriculture to emergency response.

“It’s a bridge and a navigation tool” between residents and agencies, she said.

That collaborative capacity has mattered in crises. During the pandemic, the food policy team helped steer the city’s feeding response.

Much of the D.C. office and council’s work happens behind the scenes, translating public input and policy analysis into programs before they have formal names. After food businesses described the difficulty of navigating scattered technical-assistance resources and securing early-stage capital, council working groups helped shape the proposal that became Nourish D.C.

Launched in 2021 through D.C.’s economic development office, this public-private collaborative offers grants, flexible loans, and business assistance through community lenders. That work helped position a $2 million investment of American Rescue Plan Act relief funds to leverage more than $23 million in additional capital for locally owned food entrepreneurs.

That collaborative capacity has mattered in crises. During the pandemic, the food policy team helped steer the city’s feeding response. And when government shutdowns disrupted benefits and paychecks in a city where roughly one in eight workers holds a federal job, it compiled local food resources into a single online portal.

That work is becoming more urgent, Howe said, with growing food insecurity: More than 300,000 district residents live in areas classified as low food access, according to testimony on the 2025 farmers’ market bill. As federal support shrinks and food-system pressures grow, “the district is no longer resource-rich, so we can’t afford to be coordination-poor,” Howe added.

While the office and FPC have not yet been formally eliminated, their staffing has already been hollowed out. Since Howe’s dismissal in April, her former position has remained unfilled, and her small team has been scattered across other departments. Next week’s budget vote could still preserve both entities, though the Office of Planning declined to comment, and Mayor Bowser’s office did not respond to questions from Civil Eats.