We look forward to seeing you at the 2025 Massachusetts Food System Forum on November 21, 2025 at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. Below is more information about the event program and sessions.
8:00 – 9:00 Breakfast & Check-in
9:00 – 9:25 Welcome & Opening Remarks
9:30 – 11:30 Morning Sessions
11:30 – 12:00 Networking
12:00 – 1:00 Lunch
1:00 – 2:00 Fostering Agricultural Resilience in Massachusetts, a legislative panel on supporting farmers in the 21st century
2:15 – 3:30 Scaling the Elephant of the Federal SNAP Cuts: Advocacy Tools to Help Minimize the Impact on Massachusetts Households
3:30 – 4:00 Closing
Notes
**As of September 18, 2025, the registration for the Massachusetts Food System Forum is closed. To join the waitlist, please add your name here.
If we do release tickets to the waitlist, you will see this information on LinkedIn and on this website. Thank you for your interest!**
Note: Actual room numbers for sessions will be posted at the event. There are 6 rooms with sessions in the morning. Two rooms will have a full morning session from 9:30-11:30. The remaining rooms will have two session times:
-Morning Session 1 from 9:30-10:15
–Morning Session 2 from 10:20-11:30
Full Morning Sessions (9:30 – 11:30)
Room 1: Building Resilient Seafood Systems: Strategies for a Stronger Massachusetts Food Future | Fishing industry representatives from across Massachusetts
Seafood is a vital source of nutrition, yet access to locally sourced seafood remains uneven across communities. This session will focus on building resilient seafood systems by prioritizing equitable distribution, supporting community-based fisheries, and integrating seafood into broader food system planning efforts.
Room 2: Building Local Food Security: How public investment can strengthen farm and food system resilience | Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR)
Join MDAR for a strategic discussion about how statewide farmland and food security goals are driving public investment towards building a more resilient and sustainable local food system. This session will highlight newer MDAR initiatives such as state land licensing, Farmland Action Plan implementation, Food Security Infrastructure Grant (FSIG) and the Resilient Food System Infrastructure (RFSI) program that builds capacity of food producers to feed residents of the Commonwealth, especially during times of disruption. Participants will then join an strategic discussion on where opportunities for further coordination and investment remain.
Morning Session 1 (9:30 – 10:15)
Room 3: Empowering the Youth: Connecting with the land, Connecting with our food | The Farm School, Green City Growers
Join Michael del Rio of The Farm School and Leila Skinner of Green City Growers as they share how farm visits and school gardens both present opportunities for young people to be more connected with agriculture, food production, and land. Participants will learn about each organization’s approach and participate in discussion and activities that give them an opportunity to consider their own approach to youth engagement.
Room 4: HIP messaging | Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) and Increasing HIP Utilization via Innovative Partnerships | Coastal Foodshed,
Room 5: From Barns to Bodegas: Why Independent Food Retail is a Key Component of Food Access | Franklin County CDC, LEAF Fund, Massachusetts Food Trust Program, Fruit Fair
Independent food retail plays an important and often unrecognized role in community food security. Learn how this sector fills in the gaps in food access and promotes systemic change through community economic power and wealth generation.
Room 6: The Massachusetts Farm Energy Program: Real Farm Stories of Efficiency and Renewable Energy | Center for EcoTechnology
Through the documented experiences of Massachusetts farmers, this session will explore how energy efficiency and renewable upgrades create ripple effects across the food system—advancing resilience, equity, and sustainability.
Morning Session 2 (10:20 – 11:30)
Room 3: Measuring Impact: State PreK- 12 Investment and The Future of Food Literacy | Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), Mass Farm to School, John Stalker Institute, Educators
The Massachusetts State Legislature’s investment in food literacy has helped fund a statewide grant program, professional development for educators and school wellness tools and resources. This session will review program outcomes for early education programs and Pre-K –12th grade schools and highlight practitioner experiences and visions for the future of food literacy investment in Massachusetts.
Room 4: From Competition to Collaboration: Transforming Emergency Food Systems Through Radical Partnership | Food Link, Neighborhood Food Action Collaborative, YMCA of Greater Boston
Learn how 22+ organizations of the Greater Boston Collaborative Food Access Hub are breaking down silos through shared infrastructure, collaborative governance, and dignity-centered distribution models to create a truly collaborative response to food insecurity in Boston. This session will feature key partners from the collaborative sharing concrete lessons from their first operational year. Presenters will discuss how they’ve built shared governance structures that center community voice, piloted unified data systems across previously disconnected organizations, and developed innovative models like recovered food being stored collectively for multiple distribution partners.
Room 5: Scaling Local Food through Shared Infrastructure: Meat Processing & Turning Crops into Value-Added Products | Berkshire Agricultural Ventures, Franklin County CDC Western MA Food Processing Center
This session will feature two organizations. The Western MA Food Processing Center’s Preserve the Valley program helps farmers extend their season and increase revenue by transforming surplus or peak crops into shelf-stable, value-added products. Berkshire Agricultural Ventures’ Local Meat Processing Support Program (LMPSP) is addressing critical bottlenecks in Massachusetts’ meat supply chain by investing in existing processors, expanding value-added production, and building a stronger value chain. Participants will learn about details of the value-added production processes and lessons learned for building regional capacity for local food through shared production infrastructure.
Room 6: A Tale of Two Ditches: Navigating the Maintenance of a Neglected Agricultural Ditch | CISA, Town of Amherst, Fleetwood Environmental Solutions, USDA-NRCS
The Connecticut River Valley is covered in agricultural ditches in various states of maintenance. This panel will focus on efforts by a group of farmers in Amherst and Hadley MA to clean a 500 ft long drainage channel that is on non-agricultural land and that for the past twenty or more years has caused stormwater to back up on their land and prevent them from planting, harvesting or otherwise producing food. After three years of active collaboration by the farms, CISA, MDAR, the NRCS and Fleetwood Environmental Solutions the group recently received approval from the Town of Amherst’s Conservation Commission to clean the ditch. Panel members will share their often very different perspectives on the process required to receive permission to conduct the work and the twists and turns along the way.
