[Community Story] Stocking the shelves before the storm: Cumberland’s plan for a food-secure future

Picture a winter storm that closes the highway, or a wildfire that severs the routes onto Vancouver Island. Within days, grocery shelves thin out. For a community at the end of a long and fragile supply chain, the question is not whether food access will be tested by a climate-driven emergency, but when — and whether anyone has planned for it. 

The Village of Cumberland decided not to wait for the answer. 

With a $15,000 Healthy Public Policy grant from PlanH, the small Vancouver Island municipality set out to weave food security into the heart of its emergency planning — a connection that, the project team quickly discovered, almost no local government in Canada had formally made. 

“From a practical perspective, food access and food systems are extremely important in an emergency situation,” the project team wrote in their final report. “The fact that emergency management and other systems have been built that don’t consider food system resiliency in emergencies shows a larger gap.” 

The work was led by Maurita Prato and Naomi Robert, co-chairs of the Comox Valley Food Policy Council, who brought deep roots in the region’s food systems and local government landscape. Their original goal was modest: develop two policies — one for local food procurement, one for emergency planning — that Cumberland could fold into its Official Community Plan. 

They ended up with four. 

The team built what they call “policy tools” — practical, regionally appropriate packages a council can actually act on. The first, pre-established emergency procurement arrangements, would let the Village line up trusted food vendors before a crisis so agreements can be activated the moment they are needed. The second, neighbourhood emergency preparedness programs, leans on something less tangible: the block parties, placemaking and everyday neighbourliness that mean people know who on their street might need help when the power goes out. The third turns local food procurement into routine practice, strengthening the local food economy in calm times so it is sturdier in hard ones. The fourth connects ecosystem stewardship and Indigenous food sovereignty, recognizing that resilient food systems are inseparable from healthy land and from the traditional food practices that have sustained communities here for generations. 

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The report can be accessed here.