How the Marion Institute is building a regional food system without building more silos

Celebrating and learning from those on the frontlines of public service is core to our mission at Civic Roundtable. This month we sat down with Liz Wiley, Executive Director of the Marion Institute, and Christine Smith, Program Coordinator for the Southcoast Food Policy Council.

The Marion Institute is a nonprofit in Southeastern Massachusetts working to reconnect food and community through a lens of health equity and nutrition security. Our conversation covered why they turned down the chance to multiply food policy councils, what the middle of the supply chain has to do with school lunch, and how coordination becomes its own kind of infrastructure. It was edited for brevity.

Can you tell us about the Marion Institute and your roles there?

Liz: I've been Executive Director for about eight years, and Christine is our Program Coordinator for the Southcoast Food Policy Council. Our mission is reconnecting food and communities through a lens of health equity and nutrition security, not food access alone. We do that through four programs: 1) the Food Policy Council, 2) Grow Education, our farm-to-school program in 24 schools across six districts, 3) Frogfoot Farm, where everything grown goes to food relief, and 4) Fields to Families, our gleaning program.

How did each of you end up in this work?

Liz: I studied whales for the first decade of my career. It was a genuinely cool job, but it wasn't making a difference in people's lives directly. So I moved to a local community college and started launching programs, all of which came back to food. Running programs for women on transitional assistance made it obvious: regardless of where you are on the socioeconomic spectrum, you want what's best for your kids, and food should be a basic human right.

Christine: Mine is more linear. I started in social justice work overseas, then worked in a soup kitchen for Catholic Charities in Baltimore, where we fed 900 people a day. After a few years I felt like I was hitting my head against a wall, seeing the same problems over and over. A legislative advocacy role opened up and I jumped at it. This job felt like coming full circle — back to food, at a bigger level.

Why launch a food policy council in the first place?

Liz: Our farm-to-school work was inconsistent because it depended entirely on one teacher or one principal. We all know programs like this: a great idea with a year or two of momentum that fizzles out on the shoulders of one really busy science teacher. Springfield, MA was making real strides, and one reason was a strong food policy council underneath them. That's when I realized a council could address the bigger question: how do we get local food into institutions?

You launched the Southcoast Food Policy Council Program in 2020. How did that shape the council?

Liz: Two months after launch, the pandemic happened; we were a brand-new council expected to know what to do during the COVID-19 pandemic. We started holding emergency food meetings, and that's where the learning happened. We could pull all these food system sectors together, because everybody else was busy doing direct service. We had 60 to 100+ people on those weekly calls, and I was running a real-time gaps assessment in my head the whole time. That fed into our first food system assessment in late 2021.

Other counties have called asking to start their own councils. Why do you tell them not to?

Liz: Because we don't need more silos. I'll happily help anyone start a farm-to-food-relief or farm-to-school program, but a new council in every county just fragments the work. Instead we identified county leads across the six southeastern counties who operate like we do, and we're helping them build their own advisory boards and run a community-led audit of each county's food system resilience. These assessments will get synthesized into our next 2026 Food System Assessment. The outcome is shared data and shared language so we can work more collaboratively and in a more coordinated way.

Christine: That's the policy piece too. To get a two-thirds vote on the floor, we all need to be singing from the same song sheet. We need a region saying the same thing to all its representatives, and that amplifies up to the state level.

What surprises people most about the food system?

Liz: Processing. Nobody thinks about it until you look at a school district feeding 10,000 students a day, or 14,000 in New Bedford's case. They want local food, but they need it already washed and precut, and they need to buy from an aggregator, not ten different farmers. We've lost all those middle of the supply chain businesses here. Restaurants, hospitals, and K–12 could buy far more local food if aggregation, processing, and distribution were happening locally.

What are you most excited to tackle over the next year or two?

Liz: Publishing the new 2026 Food System Assessment this fall, then taking it on the road — my hope is other regions of the state replicate what we're doing. The parallel challenge is getting people to care. Our 2021 assessment is sitting behind me and you can see how thick it is. Nobody's reading that. So we've spent the past year documenting the real pain points for producers, turning it into a film that is easier to watch, digest and hopefully generate curiosity on the issue.

How does Roundtable fit into the work?

Christine: It's how we engage a much bigger public than we could before. Our lunch-and-learn issue briefings, the emergency food resource meetings, the ways people can capture resources from them, those all live somewhere people can actually find them. Through the Root Cause Solutions Exchange we're reaching an audience of over 450, and we've had people join from across the state, even people from the Berkshires, which is across the state.

What do you find most rewarding about the work?

Christine: Working with our food equity advisors, people with lived experience of hunger. Watching someone move from not knowing anything about the food system, to learning something, to taking action. You can see the glow on them when they realize they can do this, and do it again.

Liz: Seeing our programs support each other. Through the Food Policy Council we’re backing legislation on farm-to-school and food literacy in Massachusetts, which directly supports Grow Education. And things like Cooks for Community: we grow food at Frogfoot, hand it to a caterer who makes meals, and those warm meals go out through the local hospital during wellness checks in unsheltered communities. Those are the little things I knew I wanted to seed, coming to fruition.

Learn more about the Marion Institute and the Southcoast Food Policy Council