Mission
To cultivate vibrant community-based seafood systems and the people, businesses, and organizations that support them.
Vision
We envision diverse, vibrant seafood systems that contribute to the health, prosperity, and sovereignty of fishing communities and the ecosystems upon which they depend. All those who rely on seafood for their livelihoods, nourishment, and culture are integral to this future. In our vision:
- Harvesters have access to fishing grounds, pathways for processing and selling seafood, and a viable profession;
- Consumers are connected to fishing communities, understand the value of community-based seafood, and have access to nutritious, sustainable local catch; and
- Fishing communities and their allies are empowered to actively participate in building and maintaining prosperous and resilient seafood systems.
Core Values
The Local Catch Network (LCN) is guided by a set of “core values” that reflect our intentions and what we strive to practice and uphold through our actions and words. Our core values highlight our shared commitment to learning and growing together as we work to support community-based seafood systems.
We act in service of the people in our network and strive to make a meaningful difference in their lives. We value results that move the needle towards the vision we seek.
Thriving community-based seafood systems depend on diverse voices and perspectives. We work to uplift those who are not the dominant voices of power or who have been historically silenced, marginalized, or devalued.
We take the time to understand ourselves and our work, committing to meaningful self-reflection and open engagement—whether in comfortable or challenging conversations. We extend this authenticity to the seafood systems we support by fostering trust and transparency.
We honor, nurture, and support our communities, catch, and ecosystems for current and future generations.
Relationships are at the heart of local seafood systems. We believe in the interconnectedness of all things, including the resources we depend on. Feeding people locally-harvested seafood honors this connection.
A dynamic of collaborative exchange facilitates agency, self-determination, and sovereignty, and ultimately builds more robust seafood systems.
Values in Action
Our “values in action” reflect how members of our network implement our core values in practice. Through the intentional work of LCN and applying the core values, these elements emerge. The values in action are not meant to be criteria or requirements for network members, but instead help describe how we will achieve our mission and vision and help anchor and guide our work.
A community-based fishery is defined by reciprocity among local independent harvesters who are inherently committed to the long-term health of the ecosystem and the fishery that contributes to the prosperity, sovereignty, and cultural fabric of the community.
Community-based fisheries cannot survive without equitable access to the aquatic commons. Fisheries access should be kept affordable, available to future generations, and connected to the communities where they are harvested. The oceans, lakes, rivers, and their resources should be held in public trust and not privatized.
Paying a fair price to seafood harvesters and processors, and supporting businesses helps strengthen local economies and increases the quality of life for all those whose hands touch our seafood. Community-based seafood should be available and affordable for all communities, and must be balanced against the needs and limits of the ecosystem as well as seafood harvesters’ ability to sustain a livelihood with dignity and joy. Paying a fair price supports a conservation ethic where seafood harvesters can attain higher value for a lower volume of catch, which places less pressure on our aquatic ecosystems.
Eating with the ecosystem means matching our seafood consumption to the rhythms of nature and place. It means celebrating and respecting a region’s biodiversity by harvesting a diversity of seafood and respecting the unique seasonality of every species and fishery. It means appreciating aquatic environments as complex ecological systems, and engaging and educating consumers to enable them to become conscious consumers of the ecosystem’s food production capacity.
Traceable and simple supply chains promote trust and a more direct connection between seafood harvesters, the public, consumers, retailers, wholesalers, and chefs. More direct and simple supply chains help maximize value to the seafood harvester and consumer. Information on where, when, how, and by whom seafood was harvested, processed, and distributed should be readily available to consumers. We encourage all consumers to seek out local seafood options whenever possible.
Strict levels of quality control and safe handling practices, along the entire supply chain, ensure that we honor the fish, its life, and its role in our food system. We encourage minimizing waste by using the whole animal as much as possible and educating consumers about how to utilize the whole product.
Fisheries management is key for maintaining sustainable fish stocks and livelihoods. Management should be bottom-up, ecosystem-based, and foster collaboration between seafood harvesters, scientists, policy makers, indigenous communities, and the broader public. Management should combat illegal fishing, consolidation, and privatization. Management should also address non-fishing impacts that threaten the health of our fisheries, such as climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution so seafood harvesters can attain higher value for a lower volume of catch, which places less pressure on our aquatic ecosystems.
Building a better seafood system requires thinking outside the box and a willingness to take risks. It also requires that innovative ideas are not isolated but rather spread through a network of diverse stakeholders working together around shared values and goals. Creativity and networking foster knowledge sharing, collective understanding, and mentorship needed to uplift one another and create transformative change in our local seafood systems.
The marginalization of any peoples, including those in fishing communities, is rooted in a long history of racism, exclusion, and oppression. Access to catch, harvest, and eat culturally appropriate, wholesome seafood must not be determined based on race, income, gender, class, cultural background, or ethnicity. By uplifting business models that are most impacted by injustice, we can better serve the entire community. As members of LCN, we will continually question our practices and keep an open ear to new and familiar voices to ensure we are best serving our communities.
Strategic Plan
The Local Catch Network released our first Strategic Plan in 2025, after more than a year of input from the Executive Committee, members, partners, and funders. Leveraging our momentum and looking to the future, this Plan aims to set the table for the next five years of our work (2025-2030).
Appendix
We use the word “seafood” to include all plants and animals fished or grown in fresh and saltwater systems.
By “coastal” we mean all waterfront communities engaged in the harvest of seafood, including those who live and work along our oceans, rivers, and lakes.
This is an inclusive and gender-neutral term for us, and the one used most commonly among women who fish in our network. It’s meant to refer to those who might also use the terms fish harvesters, fisherwomen, fishermisses, fishers, and intertidal gatherers, as well as those practicing restorative aquaculture on a sustainable scale.
Community-based fishermen live and work in the communities where they fish. They are typically independent, owner-operators and the bulk of the boat’s earned income circulates within close range of the community. This contrasts with fishing operations that extract money and resources from coastal communities and circulate them elsewhere, often carried out by large corporations or investors without community ties. Community-based fishermen operate small and medium scale boats that match the scale of the ecosystems where they fish. They are ecological experts attuned to the nuances of ocean rhythms, fish migration patterns, and spawning habitat. Community-based fishermen are part of the social fabric that builds identity and culture within a community. The term community-based also reminds us that what is possible in one region may not necessarily be possible in another due to differences in marine ecosystems, infrastructure, community interest, and more.
Owner-operators are holders of fishing rights (through licenses or other legal means) who also operate the vessel fishing, thus ensuring a direct connection between fisheries resources and the fisherman. The owner-operator principle has had a major positive effect in keeping fisheries access in the hands of community-based fishing fleets, which for many rural coastal communities is the largest private sector employer.
Non owner-operators include holders of fishing rights who permanently hire captains and crew. Other examples consist of: speculative investors, industry processors looking to secure access, and retired fishermen who finance their entire retirement plan with no regard for a fair transition to next generation fishermen.
The owner-operator principles also apply to businesses along the seafood supply chain whether its processing, operating a CSF, or a wholesale operation. We value control over these businesses remaining in the hands of those who are working the business, rather than far-away investors or companies that have no stake in the health or welfare of the community-based fishery.
Access refers to two distinct concepts. The first is related to access to fishing rights for community-based fishermen. Due to regulations (e.g. area closures and privatization), non-fishing impacts (e.g. climate change and pollution), and development (e.g. working waterfront displacement and development) access for community-based fishermen is constantly threatened. Access also refers to food access. The LocalCatch network stands for seafood suppliers who want to ensure that their high-quality seafood is made available whenever possible to regions and communities that face challenges associated with food security.
The act of transforming fishing access rights into monetary, private-property assets, which allows for the purchase of permits and quotas to consolidate upward to the most affluent, and often far-removed corporations. The ocean and its resources should be held in a public trust for current and future generations and not privatized. Nor should policies be designed to further consolidate fisheries access into fewer hands. Fair access to the ocean commons is supported by purchasing seafood from community based fishermen and by advocating for better policy that protect and promote, independent, owner-operators.
- Defining “local seafood” is difficult and complex because “local” means different things depending on location, marine ecosystem, and more. For example, ‘local seafood’ to someone living in Alaska is very different from someone living in Omaha. Therefore rather than propose an all encompassing definition of “local seafood,” we provide some considerations we make when defining local in the context of our individual fisheries and communities.
- Customer proximity to where the fish is landed
- Customer proximity to where the fish was caught
- Customer proximity to the fisherman
- Distance travelled by product in the supply chain
- Management boundary of the fishery
- Relationship between the fisherman and consumers
To learn more about the core values, contact us at info@localcatch.org.
About the Network
Established in 2011, LCN is a hub for knowledge exchange, collaboration, and innovation in support of local and community-based seafood systems. Members of LCN live and work in communities across the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and Indigenous territories.