Food from the Forest began in 2017 as a collaborative project between Frank Gorter and Marieke Karssen (as a sole proprietorship). They started with a year-long training program. This was soon followed by a POP3 project, and through a general partnership and two more major POP3 projects, we grew into a fantastic online platform with an increasing number of courses. Starting in 2023, all of this was transferred to an ever-growing association with a board, a team, and already a substantial membership organization and member groups. We have also obtained ANBI status. Marieke and Frank are still active and important, but by no means the only contributors anymore. Read more about our milestones and entire history on our timeline.

Food from the Forest has been an association with ANBI status since October 2023. This means that we are run by an unpaid board consisting of Joke Feenstra(president), Vincent Boogaart(treasurer) and Els van Weering(secretary).

This board is supported by an executive team that forms the core of all the association’s activities: education, communication, community building, maintenance of the online platform, member coordination, and the launch of new projects.

Surrounding that is a growing circle of members who are becoming increasingly active on behalf of the association. This includes fundraising and education. We also have an active volunteer coordinator in nearly every province who mobilizes the provincial groups.  Professional members are becoming increasingly involved in organizing projects and pilot initiatives related to harvesting, marketing, and processing. And surrounding that, there is a growing audience of listeners, readers, and participants in our activities, the online platform, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

An increasing number of organizations want to contribute, or have been created to advance the regenerative movement. These organizations often find it difficult to work with partners that are too small. Because we are an association, this can help generate scale for smaller food forest owners, for example, as well. This way they too can benefit from the offer of such a collaboration.

With most of our partners we have already done several projects and there is a long-term cooperation. For example, the projects where we worked with researcher to develop a food forest monitoring tool, a budgeting tool for your food forest and (food) forest recipes for six attractive food forest landscapes.