The Yolo Food Hub, a community-led effort in Yolo County, California to expand food production and distribution channels in Yolo County and in the Greater Sacramento Region, to improve healthy food access, stabilize food markets, increase employment and job training opportunities, and provide pandemic relief for farmers, particularly for BIPOC and historically underserved communities. 

Establishing a new food hub that supports local and regional agriculture production, purchasing, and consumption, would better aggregate, process, store, and distribute farm produce grown in Yolo County and surrounding areas on behalf of farmers in the area, but after acquiring a 5-acre barn site and conducting initial market analysis, the project team had largely been unable to advance, due lack of technical capacity, an unclear path forward, inability to overcome certain project barriers, governance, and internal divisions among stakeholders in the community. 

Through CPPI, the two-year program sought to work closely with the Yolo Food Hub team to “unstick” the project by aligning stakeholders on the critical stresses and shocks affecting local institutions, farm community, producers, buyers, and consumers, and developing clear goals, actions and resources needed to not only utilize the physical asset, but to also develop a network of farmers and local buyers to ensure financial viability of its long-term operations.

AECOM developed a detailed concept design report and phasing plan that outlined the main challenges for implementation. Additionally, RCC’s technical assistance helped clear a pathway to identify funding needs and better highlighted Yolo County Food Hub’s multiple resilience benefits, including:

• Reducing environmental impact and enhancing climate resilience of agriculture through transition to sustainable and agroecological practices

• Increasing the economic livelihood of farmers by creating greater access to markets, shared value added services, and crop planning in face of climate change

• Energy efficiency infrastructure improvements transforming current barn and other assets (potentially) into Food Hubs

• Strengthening food system resilience and decreasing food insecurity

• Protecting valuable farmland in the region

• Enhancing community engagement and empowerment as food hubs serve as community resilience, capacity building and training centers

CPPI helped transform and operationalize the community’s initial vision, standing up the Yolo Food Hub with a stakeholder group that shared a deep sense of ownership, responsibility, and organization towards the work. After more than a decade of effort, the Yolo Food Hub hired its first staff member in 2024 to further advance the project through project management, technical assistance, construction, engineering.

The Yolo Food Hub team successfully developed a robust network of regional partners including Spork Food Hub, Capay Valley Farm Shop, Esparto Unified School District, and others. Ongoing capacity-building efforts at Yolo Food Hub and its partners continues, helping to strengthen relationships with other farmers, institutions, and food hubs. Local partners also established a Regional Food System Financing Strategy further helped to secure additional resources for the Yolo Food Hub.

RCC helped the Baldwin Hills and Urban Watershed Conservancy (UWC) cultivate a new framework for how they see themselves, their role, and its potential for resilience building across all 75 square miles of its expanded territory–a framework that is now influencing current and future funded projects. RCC was able to help drive partners towards aspirations that were beyond their initial starting point. By pushing beyond the status quo, thinking bigger and bolder about the size of their challenges and the impact they want to have, CPPI efforts led local partners to take the work forward more effectively with RCC as a trusted partner towards solutions that can yield outsized impact. 

The expanded vision, and the tools necessary to implement this vision – The Resilience Blueprint and the Resilience Tool – brought together the UWC Board and staff around shared goals and objectives to broaden not just the physical territory of the conservancy but their influence, through partnerships and funding mechanisms, to catalyze resilience-focused investments. They now inform UWC’s overall strategic priorities and have helped form new partnerships, and complementary community engagement through the Urban Resilience Advisory Task Force. UWC is discussing with partners the potential for expanding the tool from a more local to a statewide scale. Additionally, the Blueprint was highlighted in the State Legislature as a centerpiece of the Watershed and Open Space Improvement Plan.

UWC leadership and partners noted that the outputs from CPPI have helped to infuse resilience across the UWC’s work–into Board framing documents, its current portfolio of projects, team capacity, and partnership models. Importantly, RCC financed AECOM to build a grant funding matrix to better prioritize opportunities. Through CPPI, partners in Baldwin Hills have secured funding through the California Resilience Challenge and other sources to directly build upon the work launched during this program. UWC and partners are using the funds to expand their engagement plan and efforts to bring the resilience tool developed through this program to communities. Additionally, Los Angeles County utilized grant materials created through CPPI to secure a $3.9 million State implementation grant that funds resilience amenities, infrastructure, and programming in parks. 

As an addendum to the CPPI work, RCC partnered with UWC to build the Baldwin Hills & Urban Watersheds Conservancy (BHUWC) funding strategy to meet the projected operational costs required for the expanded 22-fold territory. Moving beyond inconsistent state-bond reliance by aggressively pursuing sustained, the Strategy recommended diversified revenue streams across three main pillars: Existing Funds and Partnerships, Legislative Action for New Fees, Innovative Financing and Revenue Assets. Key recommendations included:

1. Maximize the impact of the $70 million from Proposition 4 by aiming to leverage an additional two dollars for every one dollar spent. This also includes incentivizing local governments to tap into their collective $740 million in park budgets and activating private sector funds through concession, sports-team partnerships, and public-private management models (like the Central Park Conservancy).

2. Advocate for new legislation to create dedicated, progressive fee structures across Los Angeles County that can mitigate externalities with fees on activities like parking and air travel at Los Angeles World Airports, estimated up to $70 million annually from county parking), and fees on Direct/Visiting beneficiaries like hotel stays and a 0.1% "Parks" fee on LA County deed transfers (estimated to generate $67.4 million annually).

3. Utilize special funding tools like Climate Resilience Districts (CRDs) and develop revenue-generating assets within the territory, such as concessions and controlled development within park boundaries that charge ground lease payments and PILOTs (citing the Brooklyn Bridge Park model).