Everyone deserves affordable access to healthy, local food. For far too long, that hasn’t been the reality for low-income communities, leading to disastrous health impacts and related health care costs. Purveyors of fresh, sustainably-produced foods tend to concentrate in high-income neighborhoods, while stores and restaurants in both urban and rural “food deserts” offer mostly “cheap calories”: high-fat, high-sugar, nutrient-poor, low-cost processed foods.

This entry is part of a series on “civic consumption,” a new approach to harnessing the market power of communities to drive social impact, guest curated by Will Byrne , cofounder and CEO of Groundswell .

This same food system has levied a heavy toll on farmers and food producers through decades of disinvestment in local and regional food systems, threatening the economic viability of small family farms and the cultural fabric of whole communities. So how can we–consumers and producers alike–rebuild a sustainable, local economy from the ground up and reclaim the power to provide healthy food for our families?

As Will Byrne explained here last year, innovators around the country are attempting to answer that question by using the shared market power of communities to effect positive change in our food and other systems. “Good food” advocates are realizing that, collectively, we already hold the potential to support a parallel system that serves the needs and values of consumer and producer communities.

Alternative values-based models have sprouted up over the years to address some of these challenges. Food co-operative markets have expanded consumer choice and values-driven, joint procurement. The community supported agriculture (CSA) model compels consumers to cooperate to gain regular access to sustainably-grown farm food while extending financial support and fair pricing to farmers. Fair Trade, meanwhile, exemplifies a global social movement to support and incentivize fair prices to producers and exporters, better working conditions for laborers, and improved environmental outcomes as a result of Fair Trade product production.

While impactful and compelling, these examples often leave out the most food insecure, low-income communities, and rarely approach changing the systems and infrastructure that is at the heart of food systems. But a new crop of like-minded companies are finding ways to organize the collective purchasing power of these communities and serve them through smaller regional networks.

About five years ago, we launched a regional food distribution project in Philadelphia named Common Market in an attempt to democratize access to good food while improving the viability of sustainable farming in the Mid-Atlantic region. We began by asking a simple question: What could we, as a community of disparate individual households, do to change the quality, affordability and accessibility of food that comes into our community?

Our answer to that question was to turn collective demand for local, farm-fresh food into purchases from sustainable, small family farms–putting power back into the hands of the producers and consumers the global food system left behind.

We see businesses and organizations all over the country employ three strategies in particular to help low-access communities foster collective power to purchase local, sustainable food: