Rhonda Phillips

Historically, individual and institutional private philanthropy has suffered from criticism of self-interest, elitism and furthering plutocracy. Community foundation philanthropy focuses on place-based philanthropy as well as advancing community well-being often through participatory engagement. Community foundations have an opportunity to embrace a community well-being paradigm and participation to allow for authentic community voice. Community participation can and will help community foundations align their funding of priorities and initiatives to meet community needs to the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Community foundation place-based activities such as the On The Table events allow shared community well-being for social change and to advance SDGs numbers 16 and 17. We suggest in this descriptive case study of ten community foundations that use of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) allows community foundations to benchmark change and reduce social inequalities in local communities.

This book will offer some chapters written on the relationship of social (in)equality, community well-being and quality of life. Social equality is an important term for social well-being and for influencing quality of life and vice-versa. Though there is not definitive clarity about this relationship, it emerges as an important issue adjacent to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A paramount of literature shows that social inequality has a vital influence in achieving community well-being, which in turn impacts quality of life. We feel that exploring these relationships will provide insights for academics, researchers, policy makers and development practitioners.

Much change has occurred in the recent past around food systems at the local level. As interest continues to rise, we were curious to examine connections of local food systems and well-being in the context of the places they operate at the state level. Health is a central component of food well-being. In this article, we focus on physical well-being. We explore the connection between food systems, as represented by farmers markets (FMs), community-supported agriculture (CSAs), and physical well-being using state level data. To investigate these relationships, we conducted an ordinal logistic regression model analyzing 2016 data from the United States Department of Agriculture for the 50 states. The results of this study suggest that there is an inconclusive relationship at the state level. While local FMs and CSAs may increase physical well-being at the state level, we did not find this in our study. This finding adds to the body of literature where the majority of the studies in this area are case studies, ethnographies, and smaller studies using some regional data and small samples for local data. We believe that this conceptual work will allow for future empirical studies to build upon this study to conduct further empirical work examining regional state and local datasets for more conclusive findings.

As the world continues to pursue a new normal following the Pandemic, community developers recognize an even greater need for their services as well as new ways or opportunities to improve the loca...