​Do you have a promising food or farming business (FFB) that needs capital, and all you’ve heard from banks, state agencies, and loan programs is “no” time and again.  Don’t despair—there is hope.  With new laws in investment crowdfunding, you can now raise capital directly from your network of customers, friends, and fans.  And with the expanding toolchest we are making available on this web site, you can do crowdfunding easily and inexpensively.
A little context: The nine counties that are part of our Western New York (WNY) Regional Food System Initiative have about 2.3 million residents.  According to 2020 data from the ESRI Business Analyst, they collectively have $133 billion in financial wealth.  About $15 billion sits in banks, and the rest is in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance funds.

But here’s the rub: Even though locally owned businesses account for most of the jobs and output in the Western New York economy, they receive a tiny fraction of bank capital and almost none of residents’ long-term retirement savings.  Local FFBs, which are mistakenly viewed as “lifestyle businesses,” get even less.  Moving even a tiny fraction of these dollars from Wall Street into FFBs could enormously boost local income, wealth, and jobs.

In fact, a growing number of Americans are doing just that. Since investment crowdfunding was legalized in 2016, 1.3 million Americans have invested more than a billion dollars in nearly 5,000 companies.  The average company has raised about $300,000 and the average investor has placed about $800 into chosen companies. More than 100,000 jobs have been created.  And the disproportionate success stories have been companies run by BiPOC or women entrepreneurs—those most marginalized in the existing capital marketplace.

But this option remains relatively unknown and unused in Western New York.  Very few companies here—and almost no FFBs—have taken advantage of investment crowdfunding.  Together, we can to change this. 

In the Resources section of this website, we have begun to list FFBs looking for capital.  You won’t find any investment crowdfunding offerings—yet—but you will find bulk pre-purchasing opportunities, which are another way businesses can secure capital.   For example, you’ll currently find the community supported agriculture (CSA) program of West Side Tilth Farm listed.  If you write a check to the business for $515 now, you will get weekly boxes of fresh produce big enough to feed two to four people.  The money then provides working capital for the farm ahead of the growing season.

Another example:  When COVID hit, my wife and I decided to support our favorite restaurant, Busboys and Poets, with a $1,000 check.  We told the restauranteur to use it to keep employees in place and just give us gift cards.  The proprietor was so pleased, he gave us $1,200 of gift cards—and we got a 20% rate of return off our investment.  Our gesture—and the many similar ones it inspired—help keep this and other restaurants in business.

If you run a FFB in Western New York and are interested in this option, we direct you to Credibles, a partner site that puts together bulk pre-purchasing deals.  If you want to raise money for your business through donations, perhaps using GoFundMe or Kickstarter, we can list that on our project web site.  Or if you want to get a loan or equity investment into your business, we can help connect you with one of nearly 100 federally licensed “portals,” and then we’ll list that offering on our site. 

Over time, we hope to make this site a go-to place, not just for businesses looking for capital, but for anyone in the region interested in investing Western New York FFBs.  We think there are millions of local dollars each year that can and should start flowing into a healthier, more just, more self-reliant local food system.

If you don’t run a business and just want to invest in FFBs, we can help too.  Over time, we will help you find local investment clubs.  Or courses on local investing.  Or tools for tapping your pension funds.  We’ve already posted extensive FAQs that can help you get started. 
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Please let everyone in the region—businesses and investors alike--know we’re here.  If you’re interested in investing, please come visit every couple of weeks (and maybe more often than that) to see what’s available.  The power to transform the region’s food system and economy ultimately lies in our wallets.

​The Community-Centered Health, Equitable, Ecological, and Regional Food System Mapping (CHEER) project seeks to make spatial data regarding the regional food system of Western New York more accessible to the public and a wide range of stakeholders through the creation and management of an online GIS mapping dashboard. This project builds on, expands, and formalizes the Buffalo food system mapping done by the Seeding Resilience project in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Food Lab members research, collate, and map data that pertain to the nine domains of the food system in Western New York, as well as summative data about the regional food system and emergency food system. The nine domains are 1) food production, 2) aggregation and wholesale, 3) food processing, 4) food retail, 5) food service, 6) institutional food procurement, 7) transportation and logistics, 8) management of wasted food and food loss, and 9) acquisition, preparation, & eating.
 
The CHEER mapping dashboard is participatory and interactive: community members can submit their “food system stories” to the dashboard, ensuring that the maps reflect Western New Yorkers’ lived experience of the food system. Furthermore, computer science researchers in the Food Lab are developing machine-learning programs that can identify fruits and vegetables in photos of produce displays. This will allow the dashboard to create a real-time image of the available foods in a community based on user-submitted photos.
 
The CHEER project supports Food Future Western New York, a regional food system assessment and planning initiative (part of Build Back Better WNY) for the nine counties of Western New York: Allegany, Cattaragus, Chautauqua, Erie, Genesee, Monroe, Niagara, Orleans, and Wyoming. As part of the CHEER project, Food Lab researchers are conducting a social network analysis to understand how the regional planning process built and strengthened personal and professional networks within the Western New York food system.

Product: A publicly-accessible website composed of interactive maps and visualizations of the nine-county regional food system of Western New York, that illustrates several domains:

• Food Production
• Aggregation & Wholesale
• Food Processing
• Food Retail
• Food Service
• Institutional Food Procurement
• Transportation & Logistics
• Management of Wasted Food & Food Loss
• Acquisition, Preparation and Eating
• Emergency Food System
• Summary Statistics on the Regional Food System

 
The website will also present profiles of organizations working to build a stronger local or regional food system throughout the mapping area, and short research-based essays on the features, challenges, and opportunities of each domain. Users will be able to submit their own “food system stories,” such as information about their business, relevant images, or personal narratives.
 
A soft opening of the website is expected in early spring of 2022.
 
Purpose: To collect spatial food system data in one location, make it publicly accessible and actionable for stakeholders and the broader community, and support the work of Food Future WNY and its Working Groups. As part of a regional, nine-county, community-led effort, the UB Food Lab is building a regional-scale mapping system using inclusive planning processes where stakeholders in a region's food system co-design the portals that map and monitor problems.
 
Team: UB Food Lab: Samina Raja (Director, PI), Nathaniel Mich (Coordinator), Eric Hughes (GIS Specialist), Oliver Kennedy (Co-I). Supported by a data advisory group composed of stakeholders from the FFWNY process.
 
The Food Lab is also conducting a social network analysis as part of the FFWNY planning process, to understand how FFWNY strengthens professional and community networks in the regional food system. Emmanuel Frimpong-Boamah (Co-PI), and Zachary Korosh (researcher).
 
Partner Input: Working groups and food system businesses and organizations are encouraged to submit information such as: contact/website, specific products and services, and relationships with other food system organizations once the website has launched. Information about specific businesses that is available through government sources is usually limited to name, location, and business type. Community and partner input will enrich this data and make the portal even more useful.

​Since the 1970s we have been eating our meals away from home more and more.  Although food eaten at restaurants account for a large portion of this, many of us also find our way to cafeterias at a variety of institutions such as K-12 schools, higher education institutions, hospitals or other facilities with food service.  So much so that many now believe that shifting food procurement practices of public and private institutions to include locally and equitably produced food can bring economic, public health, and environmental benefitsto communities (see for example Policy Link, Equitable Development Toolkit – Local Food Procurement​ 2015). 

The movement to increase local food purchasing in K-12 public schools provides a good example how this shift can result in desired impacts. According to the National Farm to School Network kids eat more and a greater variety of fruits and vegetables through farm to school meals and then subsequently by asking for changes at home.  Farmers benefit from an increase in income from farm to school sales, by having of a long-term revenue stream they can build out from, and from market diversification and growth opportunities that stem from success with schools. Communities win through increased public health and positive linkages between schools and communities particularly in low-income communities and communities of color.  Communities also realize economic impacts.  The 2020 study The Benefits of Farm to School, reported finding that each job created by school districts purchasing local foods led to and another 0.27 – 2.35 jobs, and it was found that each dollar invested stimulates $0.60-$2.16 of additional local activity.  
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Buffalo Public School (BPS) district’s efforts to source local and equitably raised food has emerged as a nationally recognized program. During the 2019-2020 school year, BPS F2S spent over $2 million, or just over 41% of its lunch expenditures, on produce, dairy, beef, juice, and other NY raised foods.  But K-12 schools are just one type of institution, there are also colleges and universities, hospitals and other health care facilities, and corrections facilities.  In NYS there are over 270 public and private colleges and universities.  The SUNY system alone comprises 64 campuses and serves over 500,000 students and faculty with annual food purchasing budgets of approximately $150,000,000 (see On the Plate at SUNY: Growing Health, Farms and Jobs with Local Food).  This same study calculated that if SUNY spent 25% of its food buy on fresh and minimally processed NY grown foods, it would create $54 million in economic output for the state.

​Headwater products being picked and packed by Headwaters ​Fulfillment Team at the Headwater Food Hub in Ontario