The Okanogan Region’s Food System Assessment: A Collaboration Between a Land-Grant & a Food-Justice Focused Nonprofit

May 01, 2023

During Fall 2023, 24 business students and a technical faculty member collaborated with nonprofit Blue Sky Minds to build the framework and content for what is now the Okanogan Region’s first Local Community Food Assessment. This document serves as a foundational document driving the work of Blue Sky Minds in northern Washington State. Blue Sky Minds builds community capacity to promote food justice and access.

Blue Sky Minds Executive Director Maria Hines and faculty member Johanna Phelps coordinated during Summer and Fall 2023 (and beyond) to draft a project design appropriate to undergraduate student capacity. During Fall 2023, students conducted research and drafted the assessment. Most content was drafted by students in Phelps’s English 402: Technical and Professional Writing course. This course is designed for non-majors with a focus on rhetorical approaches to workplace/professional and technical writing. The course highlights ethical concerns in such contexts and leans heavily on the land-grant mission of Washington State University as a framework for driving writing tasks outside of and in support of community-articulated goals. Students in the class explore the ideas of obligation and mission through the technical documents framing their learning, collaborations, and assessment in the course.

Together, Hines and Phelps wrote the project design prior to meeting students in Fall 2023. During the semester, Hines provided feedback on drafts, guided students towards data, and pushed students to lean on library support to access databases to build out the region’s first ever food system assessment. The draft was then revised during Spring 2025, with focused attention to design and imagery provided by other WSU interns located on other campuses. Once finalized, it served as the springboard for subsequent actions by Blue Sky Minds, including an additional collaboration with Phelps on a community survey conducted summer and fall 2025, drawing over 500 respondents from the target region to inform Blue Sky Minds’ programming and future activities.

Here is the final food system assessment

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y12WCVZYnMfnY6PbMnVzTqnv4TI1DpA_/view

that is linked on Blue Sky Minds’ Reports page: https://www.blueskymindsnonprofit.com/report

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