Community Food / CAIA

Community Alliances of Interdependent AgriCulture (CAIA) works to enable people to create food and farming systems that improve and sustain ecological, economic, and social health through community-based, self-organizing governance. CAIA advocates three primary goals: environmental integrity, economic opportunity and commercial vitality. CAIA's partners nationwide utilize a local organizing model that requires the active participation and collaboration of all food system stakeholders, from workers and farmers to food processors, distributors, consumers, and environmentalists.

FoodRoutes Network (FRN) and CAIA have worked together to integrate their respective web sites: foodroutes.org and communityfood.com. The combined mission of these two websites is to serve the information, networking, marketing and purchasing needs of sustainable food-and-farming activists, community-food enterprises, farm-and-ranch cooperatives and associations, and the food-concerned public. Together the two sites aim to provide accurate and up-to-date information on sustainable food and farming, searchable directories for locally grown food and sustainable agriculture resources, and opportunities to purchase on-line.

Specifically, Communityfood strives to provide an affordable and practical web-presence for the commerce of products created by community-friendly food businesses and family-farm operations. This marketplace helps agricultural and rural-based businesses expand market share through an on-line trading community using Communityfood's storefront, classifieds, and auction markets. Foodroutes.org links to communityfood.com through its own "Marketplace" feature. Communityfood.com, in turn, links to the FoodRoutes Web site and together both sites support and promote community-based, local food systems through affordable and targeted information, marketing, finance, and technical assistance.