“The Minnesota Food Charter
resulted from hundreds of
listening sessions, online town
forums, and interviews with a
diverse, very broad group of
people—thousands across the
state.”
Mindy Kurzer, Director, Healthy
Foods, Healthy Lives Institute
“Many reservations have
transportation issues. Grocery stores
are small; convenience stores have a
lot of pre-packaged, processed foods.
While convenient, it’s not always the
best food for you. That came out in
the Minnesota Food Charter, which
looks at how to create healthier
choices in your community to increase
access to better foods.”
Joanne Mulbah, SNAP Education
Program Manager, Minnesota Chippewa
Tribe
"Every person, organization, and
community in Minnesota can pick up
this document, determine what
strategies are right for them, and start
acting! The Food Charter gives us the
collective vision that is needed to pull
together and rally around so we can
leverage our many assets and make
a real difference in our state."
Jenna Carter, MPH
Sr. Project Manager at the Center for Prevention at Blue
Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota
“Food is such an incredible
part of us…. The Food
Charter is a way for me, and
I hope for all of us, to look
more critically and carefully
at food and its interrelationship with our lives.”
David Benson, Farmer,
Nobles County
“The Food Charter reflects
how people see the food
supply from their own
perspective. It’s a wonderful
document because it brings
together all that input from
different perspectives.”
Phil Brooks, CEO, H. Brooks and
Company
“There are community members trying
to increase food access from purely an
anti-poverty perspective. Others are
suggesting the same thing from a
health perspective, or from even a
transportation perspective. We’ve been
working in silos, and need to see the
commonalities and leverage those
common benefits.”
Vayong Moua, Center for Prevention at Blue
Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota
“The Minnesota Food Charter
is the civil rights movement of
our state’s food system.
Together, we have mobilized
a base of people from across
the food system to build a
strong food and farm
economy.”
Don Wyse, Professor of Agronomy
University of Minnesota
“The Minnesota Food Charter
is a model for civic
engagement and effective
policy and systems change
for local public health that
can create health equity for
all Minnesotans.”
Maria Regan Gonzalez
City of Bloomington Division of Public
Health
“It is important to Minnesota
and to the example that it sets
for the rest of our country and
indeed the world in that it will
help to ensure that healthy
food and access to it will no
longer be about where you
live, but rather how one
chooses to live. Helping to
ensure a level playing field
where food and health are
concerned.”
Mustafa A. Sundiata, Snap-Ed Regional
Educator Anoka County, University of
Minnesota
“The Food Charter synthesizes
efforts of many agencies in an
understandable way. This is
going to make everybody’s
work in the nutrition and food
distribution systems a lot more
effective.”
Dr. Ed Ehlinger, Minnesota
Commissioner of Health
“The Minnesota Food Charter supports food skills for
youth in our state, which will positively impact my
daughter's education. Someday she'll be doing meal
planning and dinner time prep thanks to the food skills
she learns in school.”
Katie Wahl, Senior Project Manager,
Terra Soma
“At The Food Group (formerly Emergency
Foodshelf Network) we plan to use The
Food Charter strategies to inform our
efforts on increasing healthy food access
in the community. We have a strong
focus on increasing access to healthy and
affordable foods as well as culturally
familiar foods to those in need. The Food
Charter will provide guidance on how to
make the healthy choice the easy choice
through system changes with lasting
impact.”
Emily Eddy White, Director of Development &
Marketing, The Food Group
“The Food Charter brings
together Minnesotans to
think and speak out
about the healthy food
system they want to bring
into being.”
David Wallinga, MD, MPA, Director of Healthy
Food Action