First Cohort of the Right to Food Fellows Learning and Action Program Meets in Denver to Reflect on the Inaugural Fellowship Year
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August 27, 2026
That’s a Wrap!
The 2025-2026 Right to Food Learning and Action Fellows just concluded a year of learning and working together. Based in five states, this inaugural cohort included six Fellows who work to strengthen the right to food in law, policy, and practice at local and state levels in their different contexts. Our final meeting of the fellowship year was an in-person retreat in Denver, Colorado, where we were hosted by Metro Caring. But the relationships will live on, rooted in shared experience and a shared vision of a future where local food and farm economies thrive and the right to food is guaranteed for all.
The cohort met eight times over a one-year period, facilitated by a team from the National Right to Food Community of Practice. The goal of the fellowship was to facilitate shared learning and mutual support among organizers of local efforts to advocate for the right to food in law and policy, and to strengthen organizing work towards a national movement for the right to food.
The 2025-2026 Cohort included six Fellows:
Erica Hall, Florida Food Policy Council
Carolina Rascon, Voice of Hunger West Virginia
Emily Settlecowski and Brizai Gomez Cortes, Metro Caring in Colorado
Tyler Yarbrough, Center for Mississippi Food Systems
Peyton Yourch, Alliance for a Hunger Free New York
(Read more about their motivations and goals in the links above.)
We all learned so much this year about applying a rights-based framework to local contexts for food systems transformation.
Together, the Fellows:
discussed and experienced international advocacy efforts;
reflected on our goals and strategies and found this work along a food systems change continuum;
deepened our understanding of how public policy helps fulfill human rights;
teased out the difference between a ‘stakeholder’ and a ‘rights holder’; and
used a ‘right to food lens’ to analyze policy and programs, both existing and proposed.
Four human rights concepts were woven throughout: roles, responsibilities, power, and agency. Our time together was punctuated with relationship building, peer mentorship, active listening, action learning, and self-discovery.
We look forward to welcoming a new cohort in the spring of 2027! Stay tuned! Meanwhile, check out some snapshots from our time together in Denver, with words of reflection from our Fellows:
Brizai Gomez Cortes and Em Settlecowski welcome us to the Mile High City and Metro Caring.
