At next week’s Climate Week NYC, we’re officially re-launching ReFED’s Food Waste Action Network (FWAN)—a member-driven community for practitioners in the food waste space. This new iteration of FWAN is built to facilitate collective action by helping members set practical, achievable goals that can be met within 12 months. By connecting professionals, grassroots organizations, and more from across sectors, FWAN creates a space to share needs and expertise that can help members achieve their food waste reduction goals.

Here are five things you need to know about FWAN:

1. FWAN helps anyone contribute to reducing food waste

Most of ReFED’s dedicated programs engage companies and organizations at the highest level to drive action toward large food waste reduction goals with proportionately multi-phase timelines.

But food waste happens throughout the supply chain from farm to fork. FWAN is designed for anyone who wants to make a difference, whether you’re a professional working directly in food waste, someone whose business touches the food system, or even someone who is personally invested in food waste reduction in their own life and community. FWAN ensures that everyone has the tools to take meaningful action.

The network welcomes members from business, nonprofit, grassroots, academia, and beyond. This diversity makes it so a sustainability manager at a retail chain could connect with a community organizer running a local composting initiative—or a student researcher could find a mentor in the field. FWAN is built to spark collaborations that may not happen otherwise, helping members expand their networks and accomplish their food waste reduction goals.

2. All members commit to a specific food waste action that they plan to achieve within the next 12 months

FWAN is built on the principle that big progress is made up of many smaller goals. As part of FWAN, new members create a food waste reduction goal—large or small—with a commitment to achieve it within 12 months. This could be anything from attending a ReFED webinar to presenting your company with a proposal to make a food waste reduction commitment in your cafeteria. By keeping goals constructive and providing a time framework, FWAN helps to ensure that progress is made—because all progress is good progress!

3. FWAN powers collaboration and resource-sharing

By bringing together a wide range of individuals and helping them connect with others working in similar spaces as well as those in their immediate area, FWAN creates a network for users to identify needs, share what they have to offer others, and team up to make progress: someone planning a food waste audit might be matched with a peer who has already done one and can speak to the experience; a member with marketing skills might volunteer to help another amplify a local initiative.

With an ultimate focus on sustained, person-level engagement—rather than one-off campaigns or high-level institutional goals—FWAN is a place for resource-sharing and democratizing information around food waste across the board.

4. FWAN’s online community space creates the personal connections that move progress forward

Through Mighty Networks, we’ve created an online space where FWAN members can explore the entire FWAN community. There, members can introduce themselves to fellow members, track and share their food waste action and progress, cheer on the progress of others, join discussions, and flag when they’ll be planning to attend the next webinar or in-person meet up.

It’s also a space to forge real-life opportunities for collaboration. By sharing what you’re working on and exploring the profiles of others in the FWAN network, you can discover common goals and uncover ways to partner up to drive food waste solutions together.

5. The relaunch is just the beginning of new and exciting programming for FWAN

FWAN is designed to shift and grow in direct response to member interactions and discussions. As members talk over their needs and the skills they can share, FWAN serves to create a living map of the food waste space, capturing the most up-to-date conversations from across sectors. ReFED keeps track of what users are discussing the most so that we can share relevant materials pertinent to the most in-demand topics, and—to ensure momentum is continuing offline—guide programming to be the most relevant and engaging to users.

Looking to the future of FWAN, you can expect in-person regional meetups, customized webinars, monthly mini-challenges to stay motivated, and more.