Bridge to Community Health (Puente a la Salud Comunitaria)

INTEGRATED APPROACH
Developing a Model for a Sustainable Food System
 
Rural family farmers work hard to produce half of the world's food, yet they make up 75% of the world's poor (FAO, 2014). We focus on the farming, consumption, and commercialization of amaranth, a highly nutritious cereal crop native to Mexico, to improve family nutrition and create economic opportunities for rural families.   Our work is based in Oaxaca, Mexico.

By acting on the ideas of farmer families and working together to grow, eat, and commercialize nutritious, local foods we are changing the food system.

Our 2015-2020 objective is to cultivate a community impact in the areas of agriculture, food consumption, and local economies by promoting integral amaranth systems through community self-organization and strategic alliances. We carry out this approach through the following programs and initiatives:

Farm-to-Table
The small-scale production of amaranth with agro-ecological methods offers farmer families nutritional, environmental, and economic benefits. By increasing nutrition education and access to healthy, local foods, marginalized farmer families improve nutrition and health.

Social Economy
Farmer families are able to sell their harvest at a higher profit by organizing micro-enterprises and regional networks with increased access to markets and value added technology. The program aims to derive both social and economic benefits for participants.

Policy and Partnerships
Puente recognizes the complexity in the current food system and thus seeks out strategic partners to advance the programmatic work as well as positively influence public policy related to our priority areas. Through grassroots communications campaigns we raise awareness of the potential of amaranth at different levels of the food system.

When a critical mass participate in these programs at the community level as shown in our Modelo de la Difusión de Innovaciones (Innovation Adoption Model), we believe our programs will spread rapidly and organically. That is one of the reasons why we work to promote local leadership at all levels of the project