Facilitating the Washington State Food Policy Forum

The Challenge

Washington’s food system faces mounting pressures from climate change, declining farmland, rising production costs, and persistent food insecurity. These deeply interconnected challenges affect water availability for agriculture, land access for farmers, regional infrastructure, and equitable food access. Yet fragmented food policy across multiple agencies and competing stakeholder interests makes coordinated action difficult. The state needed a trusted forum where diverse stakeholders could find common ground and develop consensus recommendations balancing agricultural viability, environmental stewardship, and food security.

Our Role

For seven years, Ross Strategic has served as facilitator and process manager for the Washington State Food Policy Forum, a legislatively established public-private partnership. We design and facilitate all Forum meetings, manage membership coordination, support small working teams, and lead development of consensus recommendations and legislative reports.

Our facilitation emphasizes building shared understanding before pursuing solutions through structured learning processes, targeted small team discussions, and carefully designed consensus-building exercises. We regularly use the Forum’s equity filter to ensure recommendations consider impacts across different communities.

A defining example is Managing Water to Ensure Food Security in a Changing Climate, addressing the contentious intersection of water rights, climate adaptation, agricultural viability, and salmon recovery. Over 18 months, we facilitated learning sessions featuring climate scientists, water policy experts, and farmers; helped members navigate tensions between agricultural water needs and instream flow protection; and reached consensus on three strategic recommendations including establishing an Office for Western Washington Water.

We have guided the Forum through recommendations on agricultural land preservation, climate resilience funding, Climate Commitment Act fuel tax exemptions, urban agriculture, state branding programs, and food assistance coordination. We authored nine legislative reports since 2017.