In This Issue: Shepherding Community Engagement

First paragraphs: I start by sharing some exciting news: We have just launched our Community Supported Journal Shareholder pledge drive. This support will allow us to become an open access journal— eliminating journal subscriptions, fostering the broadest distribution of JAFSCD content. We are modeling our open access campaign on a model familiar to those involved with food systems—community supported agriculture (CSA)—to become a community supported journal. We are seeking pledges from food studies, food systems, sustainable agriculture, and other degree, research, and extension/outreach programs from around the world to purchase the open access shares in JAFSCD. The pledge campaign will run through August 31, 2017 (with payments due in September). If we meet our threshold of $65,000 in pledges, we will become open access as of January 1, 2018. As part of our effort to broaden JAFSCD’s reach and impact, we will soon begin to use altmetrics to look at our social media penetration as a measure of JAFSCD’s impact at the community level—especially in communities of intractable poverty and food insecurity. This is made possible with the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This quantitative data, along with a stakeholder survey and story telling, should help us gain valuable insights into what practical change JAFSCD is fostering at the forefront of the good food movement, along with how JAFSCD is becoming more diverse and inclusive in its content. We hope you will join us in this endeavor by encouraging any program, organization, or department you are affiliated with to pledge now and annually, becoming a member of the JAFSCD Shareholder Consortium. Learn more at http://www.lysoncenter.org/index.php/jafscd-shareholder-campaign...