Our Focus
The Food Communities Network is a new bilingual pan-Canadian network.
Our focus is on the sharing of ideas, knowledge and experiences around building food resiliency in municipalities and communities across Canada and on Indigenous Territories.
We are a project on MakeWay’s shared platform, which provides operational supports, governance, and charitable expertise for changemakers. The shared platform enables more time and money to go towards achieving greater impact. MakeWay is a national charity that builds partnerships and solutions to help nature and communities thrive together.
Staff Team
Moe Garahan, Project Director
moe@justfood.ca
Moe has been working on food and farming issues in Ottawa since 1995. Focused on community development and community economic development approaches, she has facilitated the establishment of many ongoing community and regional food initiatives in Ottawa, (including Just Food) while supporting provincial and national food initiatives. Since 2004, she has been the Executive Director of Just Food, working with teams to integrate food access and food localism within the mixed urban and rural settings of the Ottawa region.
Nathalie McSween, Coordinator
info@fcn-rcn.ca
Nathalie has been working on food security issues since 2006 both as a local community leader and as an academic. Nathalie has extensive network coordination experience. From 2014 to 2020, she was the Executive Director of the Outaouais Roundtable on Hunger and Social development where she led, with the Roundtable’s members, the Food Rescue Initiative and the Community Hunger Mapping Initiative, amongst others.
From 2006 to 2014, Nathalie studied and learned from farmer movements and food leaders across the globe. Her Ph.D. thesis in Applied Social Science looked at the mobilization of farmers across scales in West Africa and her Master’s thesis looked at the impact of fair trade on local development in Burkina Faso. Nathalie is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Saint Paul University and is a member of the team of researchers working on the SSHRC-funded research project “Civil Society and Social Movement Engagement in Food Systems Governance”.