Food Waste: Strategic Communications and Partnership Guide

Co-authored with Lindsey Ganson, MP&F Strategic Communications, with contributions from Linda Breggin, Environmental Law Institute, and Evan Wofford, MP&F Strategic Communications

In 2019, NRDC’s Food Matters team released Tackling Food Waste in Cities: A Program and Policy Toolkit (“the Toolkit”), which outlines a range of policy and program options that cities and other partners can use to reduce food waste, and supports informed decision-making about what strategies may be most feasible and effective in their community. Once a community develops a plan to implement their selected strategies, they must first build support with both external and internal audiences.

This Strategic Communications and Partnership Guide serves as a companion piece to the Toolkit and provides a framework for how to build that crucial community support. As explained in the Toolkit, tackling food waste involves the need for diverse strategies in a variety of policy and program areas. Each of these strategies entails interacting and communicating with different audiences. Communicating effectively to these audiences is essential to building community support for executing programs and policies aimed at reducing food waste. Drawing from the experience of the NRDC Food Matters team and local partners, particularly Nashville and the Nashville Food Waste Initiative (a project launched by NRDC) we identify the most effective approaches for city policymakers and agency staff to communicate about their efforts. 

The Guide includes a three-part framework for talking about food waste strategies and building support for both public and private investment in these strategies: messaging to your audiences, leveraging relationships, and earning media coverage that can help influence outcomes. The full guide addresses each aspect of the framework in more detail to help city policymakers and agency staff develop communications and partnership plans that will build community support and advance the work in their communities. 

Please contact us as foodmatters@nrdc.org for a PDF of the Strategic Communications and Partnership Guide.