The San Luis Valley Local Foods Coalition (LFC) serves a geographically vast and agriculturally significant region in southern Colorado, where farming, ranching, water stewardship, and community resilience are deeply intertwined. Stretching across six counties — Alamosa, Costilla, Conejos, Mineral, Rio Grande, and Saguache — the San Luis Valley is one of the world’s largest alpine valleys and home to a long tradition of agricultural production and multigenerational stewardship of land and water. At the same time, the region faces complex challenges common to many rural communities, including water scarcity, economic pressures, barriers to food access, and workforce and infrastructure limitations.
Over the course of a multi-year process, the LFC partnered with New Venture Advisors (NVA) to develop the San Luis Valley Community Food & Agriculture Action Plan, a regional strategy designed to strengthen the local food economy, improve equitable access to healthy food, support producers and food businesses, and advance long-term environmental stewardship. The resulting plan reflects deep collaboration across communities, sectors, and counties, and provides an actionable framework for implementation throughout the region.
The Opportunity
The LFC works to foster an equitable local food system that restores the health of the people, community, economy, and ecosystem. As the Coalition’s programs and partnerships expanded, leadership saw an opportunity to build a more unified vision for the food system that could identify shared priorities, align partners around action, and strengthen coordination across the Valley.
Just as importantly, the LFC wanted the Action Plan to be shaped by the realities facing producers, food businesses, and residents across the region. The planning process aimed not only to identify needs and opportunities, but also to build community ownership and relationships among organizations, institutions, and residents working across the food system.
Partnering with New Venture Advisors
NVA worked closely with the LFC and the Project Stewards – a highly engaged, diverse community advisory group from the region – to design and facilitate a collaborative planning process centered on inclusive engagement, actionable recommendations, and long-term implementation.
The Action Plan built on the robust Community Food & Agriculture Assessment conducted by the LFC and NVA from 2022 to 2023. The assessment involved more than 1,300 community members and surfaced key strengths, barriers, and opportunities across the regional food system, ultimately helping establish the priorities that shaped the Action Plan’s goals.
Over three years, the action planning process engaged more than 1,750 farmers, ranchers, food entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, educators, and community members through interviews, focus groups, surveys, and community action-planning sessions held throughout the Valley. The process emphasized accessibility and inclusion, including bilingual engagement and facilitation support for Spanish-speaking participants.
New Venture Advisors supported this multi-year effort through:
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- Designing and supporting a regional planning process that gathered input across all six counties and helped community members identify shared goals, challenges, and opportunities for the food system.
- Conducting research and analysis to better understand the Valley’s food and agriculture landscape, including producer needs, food access barriers, infrastructure gaps, workforce challenges, and environmental priorities.
- Supporting stakeholder engagement with producers, community organizations, local governments, educational institutions, food access organizations, and residents to ensure the plan reflected diverse perspectives and lived experiences.
- Helping synthesize extensive community input into a clear and actionable framework organized around four core priority areas: Education & Engagement, Producers & Food Business Opportunities, Food Access, and Environment.
- Developing implementation-oriented recommendations that identify practical opportunities for partnership, infrastructure investment, policy development, and program expansion across the regional food system.
Throughout the process, community participation remained central. As noted in the plan’s foreword, the Action Plan was shaped by hundreds of hours of community input — from one-on-one conversations to focus groups, surveys, and community sessions. The process also helped strengthen local leadership capacity and deepen relationships among partners working across sectors and counties.
Moving Forward
The San Luis Valley Community Food & Agriculture Action Plan is designed not as a static document, but as an evolving framework for collective action. The LFC and its partners are now positioned to continue advancing the plan through ongoing collaboration, community engagement, and implementation partnerships.
The plan provides a shared vision and practical roadmap for strengthening local agriculture, supporting food businesses, improving food access, and stewarding the Valley’s land and water resources for future generations. By grounding the work in community priorities and regional collaboration, the planning process has helped build stronger alignment across organizations and sectors while reinforcing the Valley’s long-standing culture of resilience, stewardship, and mutual support.
Photo courtesy of San Luis Valley Local Foods Coalition
