Creating systems that support food sustainability is of utmost importance for healthy communities, regenerative economies, and the preservation and restoration of our natural world. By selecting more effective ways to reclaim our food sources, shift our eating habits (for personal, collective and planetary health), halt the extinction of many of the world's species, and promote economic justice, we can create healthy, regenerative systems that sustain and nourish people and the environment.

At Vital Systems, we bring together various stakeholder groups to collect, frame, and share knowledge about food and farming practices that can help build communications processes, interconnect communities, and provide infrastructures that promote healthy, food systems. Through our highly collaborative work with a variety of food and farming entrepreneurs, investors, and community leaders, we actively enroll diverse audiences with current, meaningful, accessible and actionable information.

To accomplish our key activities, Vital Systems:

• Collaborates with Slow Money Northern California (Slow Money NoCal) to develop educational materials for investors, local food and farming entrepreneurs and communities who oversee local food systems and promote social, environmental, governance and financial issues through triple top (PDF Download) and bottom lines.

• Creates “Conversation Starters” in the form of customized DVDs that inform the interdisciplinary context of regional food and farming infrastructures including: stories, case studies, interviews and methods for creating networks of sustainable food systems.

• Promotes effective transfers of knowledge and paths by actively seeking mission-compatible collaborators to continue to evolve the Our Daily Bread Prize Program (ODB), and other Vital Systems' initiatives.

• Offers resources and tools that include stories and a knowledge base (a searchable bibliography), as well as lists of other groups doing similar work.

The Evolution of Vital Systems

Vital Systems is a social enterprise that educates and facilitates collective knowledge and collaborations focused on redefining underlying values of money and ensuring local food security.

We have evolved from the non-profit Sustainable Ventures that catalyzed values-based purchasing decisions through access to integrated information from nine market sectors about environmental, social, governance, and financial sustainability.

By developing and implementing true cost pricing practices (the inclusion of all costs impacting people, places, products and services) as well as true cost accounting (accounting for the integrated performance profits achieved for the inclusion of people as assets), we can be empowered to influence policy through purchasing decisions.