Cultivating Sustainable Revenue for Impact Community-rooted food organizations across the country are innovating new ways to generate income that sustain their missions and deepen local impact. Yet, as many of these organizations know firsthand, balancing financial sustainability with equity and community accountability can be complex.
In this first session of the Rooted & Rising series, Daniel Ross (DAISA Enterprises) and Ismail Samad (Corbin Hill Food Project) shared strategies for developing mission-aligned enterprises through the Lean Approach—a method that prioritizes adaptability, feedback, and iteration over rigid business plans.
Participants explored how to test ideas quickly through small-scale pilots, using the Social Business Model Canvas as a flexible framework to identify customers, challenges, and potential solutions. This approach encourages organizations to stay rooted in community realities while navigating the fast-changing landscape of funding, markets, and policy.
“It’s not about getting it perfect, It’s about learning fast, testing, and adjusting with your community in mind.” - Daniel Ross

Instead of lengthy business plans and expensive feasibility studies, the Lean Approach helps organizations:

• Clarify their customers, problems, and solutions using the Social Business Model Canvas
• Design small-scale pilots or “Minimum Viable Products” (MVPs)
• Test key assumptions and refine ideas before investing deeply
• Keep community needs — not just profits — at the center of enterprise design​

“Failure isn’t final, It’s feedback. It’s a chance to do no harm and stay grounded in your values while innovating.” Ismail Samad.
Like the broader work emerging in Food is Medicine (FiM) and Values-Based Procurement (VBP), these conversations reflect a field that is both innovative and adaptive—constantly reshaped by local creativity and external challenges such as funding shifts or policy change.
Leaders across the food system are eager for deeper shared learning and collective strategy. Yet, as DAISA’s recent research in the Midwest shows, the value and effectiveness of these collective strategies depend critically on:

• Funding for authentic participation and organizational capacity
• Infrastructure that supports inclusive and adaptive network design
• Cross-sector partnerships that honor local expertise and community leadership

Building this infrastructure requires funders and institutions to move beyond transactional support and toward sustained investment in relationships, networks, and systems that endure.
Over 50 practitioners joined the conversation from across the U.S., exploring new ways to sustain community-led food systems through entrepreneurship. We reflected on how funders, farmers, and local businesses can work together to create mission-aligned revenue streams, from pop-up markets to local food lockers.
The Rooted & Rising Webinar series, Co-hosted by DAISA Enterprises and the Food Systems Leadership Network (FSLN), continues this fall and winter! 
This aims to bring together community-rooted leaders who are shaping the future of food systems transformation. Designed for practitioners navigating the intersecting challenges of burnout, crisis, and organizational change. Offering practical tools and collective care for leaders on the frontlines of food justice and equity. This is a free, multi-part series that creates space for collective learning, reflection, and strategic action.

Upcoming Events
Join us for future sessions in December in the Rooted & Rising series, where we’ll continue exploring:

• Sustainable business models for food justice organizations
• Strategies for collaboration and burnout prevention
• New ways to fund and strengthen community-rooted systems
  
  

🌻 Next up: FSLN’s first Harvest Hour on Wednesday, November 19 (4–5 PM EST) — an open space to connect, share updates, and celebrate the work moving across the network.
👉 Register for Harvest Hour here

​We shared how DAISA is reimagining what a workplace can be—how we’re embedding equity into operations, leadership, and culture. This session was more than a presentation. It was a call to deepen our values within, as we seek transformation outwardly.

The work isn't just about systems. It's about the people inside them.

This is why we've taken a hard look inward at our workplace, our practices, and how we show up for each other, developing inclusive and supportive policies and culture. 
In this conversation in Portland, we walked through our DAISA Decision-Making Principles, a living guide that helps us navigate power, equity, and clarity in how decisions get made.
Instead of defaulting to hierarchy or urgency, we ask:

• Who’s closest to the work and best positioned to decide?
• How do we bring humility and feedback into the process?
  
• Can we take risks and learn out loud? without fear?
  

Our team makes decisions with intention that are anchored in transparency, proximity to knowledge, and accountability to our shared values. We balance collective input with the need to keep momentum moving forward. Because perfection isn’t the goal. Alignment is.
One of our most powerful internal tools is the DAISA Reciprocity Framework, which guides how we care for our team and hold shared accountability. 
Reciprocity is the mutual exchange of value, support, and growth between DAISA and its team members, where everyone is both contributing to and benefiting from our shared mission.
We use it to assess when:

• Team members need more support to meet expectations
• We as an organization need to recalibrate commitments to clients
• There’s a disconnect between intention and impact

This approach invites dialogue, not shame. And it helps us sustain trust while staying aligned with our goals.

We also shared how we’ve moved away from outdated productivity models. Instead, we ask:

• Are we progressing on project goals, thoughtfully and in collaboration?
• Are we contributing to DAISA’s culture, strategy, and sustainability?
• Are we communicating with clarity and care, both internally and externally?

This framework gives us a transparent and human-centered way to evaluate both individual and team efforts. It helps us stay grounded in impact and well-being.
These practices were created through collective learning through dialogue, not from a silo. We've been inspired to reimagine what work can look and how to challenge the conventional work culture:

• Holacracy – Our internal structure and committees were inspired by Holacracy - A model for decentralized decision-making. Instead of following the traditional methods of Top-down management, we’ve created clear roles and self-organizing teams that empower individual members to lead in areas aligned with their passions and strengths. Using this approach, we can stay flexible, values-driven, and collaborative - making space for shared leadership and deeper accountability across DAISA. (To learn more about our committees contact us!)
• Open Book Management – Transparency and shared ownership in finances
• 4-Day Workweek – In response to the trauma amplified by the pandemic and burnout throughout our team, we piloted and fully adopted the 4-day workweek to support rest and focus. Its already made a huge difference in our productivity and mental health without sacrificing our client connections. Instead of continuing to work 40 hours a week, we now work 32 hours M-Th. With more time to rest and reset, our team is showing deeper thinking and creativity. This is a great example of how when we priortize our team and wellbeing, the work gets better too.
• Co-op Business Models – While we remained an LLC, we borrowed tools from cooperative thinking to deepen engagement and transparency

We’ve also offered team-wide trainings in:

• Gender justice & pronoun usage
• Racial equity and anti-oppression
• Neurodiversity in the workplace
• Trauma-informed leadership

These resources have helped us stay in conversation, with each other, and with the kind of future we want to build.​

Our session at Resilience and Resistance sparked incredible conversations about what it means to build organizations that are effective, equitable, and worth staying in. The tools we shared are still evolving, but the intention is clear:
We don’t want to win justice at the cost of our people.
We want to build justice with our people, starting inside.
So whether you’re leading a team, organizing community efforts, or holding up the back end of a justice-centered org, we hope this gives you something to reflect on. Something to bring back to your own workplace.
Food justice is not just about land and systems, it’s about the soil we’re growing in every day. And we believe that soil should be healthy, caring, and deeply rooted in our values.
DAISA is eager to keep building and learning in the community. If you'd like to explore these practices further, download our materials, or set up a conversation about incorporating them into your organziation, reach out through our contacts page or email Karina directly at [email protected]. 
Stay connected! Our upcoming webinar series will dive deeper into these frameworks, offering tools, care, and community to help you cultivate your own equity-rooted people-centered workplace. ​

Gus took great joy in the mix of people that were at the farmers’ markets and the market day buzz of community activity. He greeted everyone, farmers, customers, people out in the market area, and asked all their opinions with equal gravity. 
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Gus’ accomplishments are legendary, he served as Under-Secretary of Agriculture during the Clinton Administration, established WIC farmers’ market coupons, was Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture to name a few. USDA’s August Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) funding program is named after him due to his innovations and tireless promotion of nutrition incentives as a consummate leader and connector.  But what I most learned from and loved was his gift that was to include everyone, talk to everyone, make all feel known and recognized for their contributions, always listening.  The input he received walking and chatting at farmers markets was integrated into real national policy.

While Gus was not the originator of the Produce Prescription (PRx) program model, he  understood its power to make connections, and helped to make Wholesome Wave an early pioneer and driver in the field. The Wholesome Wave models consisted of pediatricians at community health clinics “prescribing” healthy produce to patient families where there was risk of diabetes, with the prescriptions redeemable at a local farmers’ market. ​

In spite of a unified shift to scale PRx programs as a response to health disparities, within this pursuit of health-focused policy, a tension has arisen between food & farm program leaders, and health-focused leaders.
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Some (not all) PRx program leaders working on policy change make the case that in order to be successful embedding PRx into healthcare systems, it must be entirely seen as a healthcare intervention, and what we need are efficient systems to deliver this intervention and impact data, to impress on healthcare policy makers that this intervention is scalable and cost effective.  They emphasize standardization of data and systems to allow for the biggest data sets possible to show impacts. In this approach, farmers’ markets are largely set aside as too complex and inconvenient as the primary design for redemption venues, as are smaller neighborhood stores (such as bodegas, corner stores, ethnic grocery stores, etc), lacking consistent technology and capacity. These leaders ultimately want large retailers and health systems to integrate PRx programs, with community-based organizations being phased out as activators and managers.  

I have heard some (not all) PRx program leaders focused on embedding into health say that any advocacy or program design around food & farm systems or local farmers is only distracting and even disruptive to the primary goal of health adoption.  

Other activists continue to focus on a more holistic approach - that local food & farmers are important for long-term community health. Some Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) leaders have emphasized the importance of cultural foods, investment of the prescription dollars in BIPOC-owned producers and retailers, dignified farmers and local food systems jobs. They see the ethnic grocery stores, bodegas, co-ops, and markets of their communities as key assets to support.  They have their prescriptions redeemable at urban and rural markets owned by community members, sometimes still resorting to paper coupons when technology is not available for these lower-resourced retailers.  

​Knowing the many obstacles low-income patients face, many community-driven programs add-in wrap around supports to make the program accessible and effective.  These programs make sure to provide cultural healthy recipes and ongoing appropriate motivations to patients from community health workers. They provide culturally-centered nutrition education and fun incentives to participate. They support and build new distribution and retail assets where they are lacking. They take into consideration the transportation issues that low-income people often face, and use creative solutions like home-delivery and mobile markets to bring healthy food right to isolated patients, understanding the unique needs of their home communities.​

When programs focus only on scale and standardization of data, there are risks that the local nuances of language, culture, specific needs and strengths, and community leadership can be overlooked.  When programs are defined only at the mass scale by the largest actors, opportunities to invest in diverse assets can be lost, and disparities maintained.  

The great vision of targeting institutionalization of PRx into Medicaid/Medicare is highly laudable.  If achieved it would provide access to healthy fruits & vegetables for millions of low-income people who are most in need.  It is a worthy and powerful ambition that would take  a certain amount of strategic pragmatism required to have success in this quest.

But who gets left out of this trajectory?  Who keeps power and profits in this model?  From everything we have learned about community health, is access to fruits & vegetables enough for behavior change and long-term sustained population wellbeing? ​

Do we need to remove integration with food systems change in order to have success with healthcare policy?  Of course, if we are to have fresh produce to keep our bodies healthy, we need viable farms, at least somewhere. And if we want people to be able to afford healthy produce outside of government benefits we need flourishing local economies. Our health leaders are also growing in awareness that “Social Determinants of Health,” such as access to fresh produce and decent economic opportunities, are as critical to positive health outcomes for populations as access to medical attention. ​

Wholesome Wave, a national 501(c)3 non-profit that addresses nutrition insecurity by making healthy produce available and affordable for people who need it most, released the first-of-its-kind research report, “Produce Prescription Programs: US Field Scan 2010-2020.”  Wholesome Wave engaged DAISA Enterprises in 2020 to conduct the national field scan research.
​
“Wholesome Wave helped pioneer produce prescriptions back in 2010, encouraging healthcare providers to prescribe the fruits and vegetables needed to help someone prevent or manage diet-related diseases, having a significant impact on people’s health,” said Michel Nischan, co-founder, Wholesome Wave. “We’ve worked hard the last eleven years to launch more than 100 Produce Prescription Programs around the country, empowering low-income families to make smart food choices by closing the nutrition gap with affordable fruits and vegetables.”
 
DAISA identified and researched more than 100 new Produce Prescription Programs which began between 2010-2020 for this report, examining data related to program eligibility and operations, partnership development, program longevity, prescription redemption mechanism, funding sources and more, as well as conducting interviews with 19 of the program operators and reviewing news articles, reports and policy briefs and program implementation guides. 
 
High-level research findings include:

• Between 2010 and 2020, about 100 new programs housed within or partnering with healthcare entities began operations throughout the United States, with the fastest growth occurring within the last five years.
• To redeem prescriptions, 48% of programs partner with farmers’ markets and 68% utilize a paper voucher. However, partnership with retail grocery markets (29%) as well as on-site produce distribution (20%) are also growing in popularity as programs seek to diversify access.
• The top three health factors used to screen eligible produce prescription patients include food insecurity (38%), unspecified diet-related chronic diseases (51%), and diabetes/pre-diabetes (33%). To increase equity and access, many programs are shifting away from requiring a diagnosis of a diet-related condition and instead screening more broadly for food insecurity or being at risk for diet-related disease.
• Inconsistent or insufficient funding leaves programs at risk of failure and hinders efforts to grow and innovate. With only 16% of the examined programs citing federal funding as their primary source, there is a resounding call to integrate produce prescriptions as a preventative healthcare service within Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance plans.
• The pandemic has exacerbated food insecurity especially within BIPOC communities and the need for nutrition incentives is higher than ever. In pivoting operations, some programs have increased efficiency through delivery, drive-through markets and virtual educational offerings, while acknowledging the effects of inequitable Internet access and fewer opportunities for social interaction.

 
​“The role that nutrition education plays increasing redemption and produce utilization underscores the importance of embedding produce prescription programs holistically,” said Benjamin Perkins, CEO, Wholesome Wave. “This research showed that 70% of programs named nutrition education or culinary instruction as a crucial component to this program as a whole. Similar to medication adherence, if we do not factor in the context in which participants live their lives, the likelihood of uptake diminishes.”

The DAISA team is grateful to play a role in advancing the understanding of the Produce Prescription Program landscape and why this powerful model is experiencing a groundswell of interest from communities as another path towards health and well-being through nutritious food.

Young Mountain Tea's growth strategy and impact thesis is being fine-tuned and the company will be approaching other potential business partners and investors over the next few months. 


About Young Mountain Tea
Young Mountain Tea was launched in 2013 when Founder Raj Vable made a promise to a Himalayan non-profit: if they would organize local mountain farmers to grow high-quality tea, he would set up a company in the US to sell it. The company’s mission is to develop a market that raises up emerging tea makers, creating vibrant mountain economies and healthy lands across the Indian subcontinent. The company specializes in sourcing single-origin, organic, loose-leaf teas direct from smallholder farmers. Their collection of 25+ teas is available through the company’s website and sold to bulk and private label companies. 

About DAISA and DAISA Capital
DAISA Enterprises was founded by Daniel Ross in the fall of 2015. It works at the intersection of food, health and economic development. DAISA provides strategy consulting, initiative design and management services, for national and regional philanthropic foundation and impact investor clients, as well as high-impact social enterprises, working in community food systems, health, and community development. 

​DAISA Capital is a branch of DAISA Enterprises and was co-founded with Gustavo Mamao, a serial entrepreneur who came to join DAISA as part of a plan to prove a new model for investing in and building the Sustainable Food and Agriculture space. DAISA Capital expects to support a small portfolio of inspiring food companies, and it is looking for other Investors partners in the Food and Impact Investment field to grow its model / approach.

For more information, contact [email protected]

Each of the conversations touches key elements of the EFOD Collaborative’s work, which is driven by a critical need for communities themselves as the drivers of local economic development. The organizers featured in the podcasts say this in a multitude of ways. In the third of five episodes, Lorena Andrade of La Mujer Obrera in El Paso, Texas, describes how the work of EFOD is as much about defending community as it is creatively bringing new communities into being. Rashida Ferdinand of Sankofa Community Development Corporation in New Orleans joins Lorena in that perspective, naming how EFOD’s collaborative, equity- and community-driven nature enables the network to be a pathway for lasting change. ​

Co-hosted by Maria Elena Rodriguez (DAISA Enterprises) and Annalina Kazickas (Wallace Center’s Food Systems Leadership Network) this August 2020 webinar explored the possibilities that exist at the intersection of arts, culture, and food systems. ​