Young Farmers Engagement Map

If you’ve been in a lot of organizing spaces you may have heard of the phrase “leadership ladder” or “engagement ladder” to help map out how to bring folks into your work with gradually increasing their involvement. We know with our base of farmers, ranchers, land stewards, and supporters that you all are busy and that increasing your work with us on a steady ladder may be challenging or downright impossible while farming.

We choose to represent all the ways to build leadership skills with us and be a leader in our Coalition as a map to encourage you to hang out, move around different pathways, always feel like you can step up and back as you have capacity, and embrace curiosity to explore new ways of engaging. 

We hope to build skills for as many farmers as we can in higher levels of the ladder to prepare you to be leaders in agricultural and policy spaces beyond our Coalition, but this map is designed to also be sustainable and intentional in that investment. We seek to prioritize building long-term capacity and sustainable engagement with our base rather than short-term skill growth with a steep drop off after one really big event or leadership moment. We hope you’ll learn as many skills as you can with us while always feeling welcome and encouraged to hang out in lighter lift opportunities in between.

Advocacy and structural change is a slow game with many ups, downs, and lateral strategy shifts. Embodying the idea of a map rather than a ladder can help us build healthy and sustainable organizing energy in our national community.

This map is a representation of some pathways you might take as a farmer leader in our community. 

The home page of the map includes four categories of leadership that are sorted approximately by the audience you are seeking to influence or sway when you step into those leadership roles. As you click through the different categories you will find examples of activities you can do within our Coalition at different levels of policy, advocacy, and storytelling skills. 

This map is not an all-encompassing “leadership in the food systems” map – it is a “leadership within opportunities at Young Farmers” map. 

You will notice that across all four categories of leadership, farmers moving to “higher” levels are taking on more distinctly Young Farmers leadership opportunities – speaking to our campaigns, representing our organization in movement and community spaces, building knowledge and confidence as a young farmer engaging with our mission of using policy change to work toward a radical farming future. We hope that by embracing skill building and practicing advocacy, campaigns, and organizing activities with us, we can also support you each as farmer leaders to identify what kind of leadership feels good for you, and help you connect to other spaces beyond the Coalition where you can live into those practices. 

Levels 1-3 in this map generally reflect a personal growth in skills like storytelling and connecting with a campaign. You can find a definition of the levels on the whole in one of the bubbles on the home page, as well as a definition of what farmer leadership means to us in general at Young Farmers. Higher levels start to involve opportunities to be long lasting leaders and campaign spokespeople for the Coalition’s current work.

Every activity in this map is an opportunity that pops up on occasion when you organize with us, but they aren’t necessarily all available or running at all times, nor is this a comprehensive representation of all the ways you might engage with us as a farmer leader. 

If you want to learn more about anything in the map, please feel free to reach out to our team by email at info@youngfarmers.org.

Click through each category of leadership below to find a description of where those leaders take action, and click on the levels within each section to see examples of activities you might engage in. 

When you’d like to zoom out, just click on the background to head back to the home page and explore elsewhere!