Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (37 page)
Read Blessing the Hands that Feed Us Online
Authors: Vicki Robin
HOW TO DO A FOOD 2020 EVENT
Food 2020 is what we called our food system visioning and community mobilizing event. There are many approaches to community organizing and participatory planning, so rather than a recipe I'll give you key ingredients.
Develop a core team, making sure each member has a real interest in the prosperity of your farms, farmers, ranchers, and all the systems that bring food to the table. Be sure to invite some key players already working “in the field,” so to speak: agency and NGO representatives. Agree on a motivating purpose for your event.
Make a guest list of everyone involved in the food system in your locale. Include in your brainstorming produce and grain farmers (from CSA growers to field crop farmers), livestock farmers, dairy(wo)men, grocers, farmers' markets, institutional purchasers (hospitals, schools, churches, feeding programs), advocacy groups, elected officials, distributors, educators (farmer training, teachers), grant makers, lenders . . . oh, yes, and eaters who care!
Engage one or two really good facilitators (volunteer or paid) who have familiarity with the techniques you'll use. I use, as needed, open space, World Café, Conversation Café, dynamic facilitation, TOP (technology of participation) processes, and comedy improv. Whatever keeps the group creative, focused, moving forward. A graphic facilitator helps keep the group focused and produces a beautiful picture of the essence of what is said. This picture is a record and can be unfurled at future meetings for inspiration.
Pick a date and a big room with movable chairs.
Craft an invitation. Here's the one we sent for our May 2011 event:
We hope you can join us for a special daylong event on May 23, 2011, called Food 2020. We'll meet at 9:30 at the Unitarian Church north of Freeland and spend the day visioning and planning for a more vital and prosperous food system on Whidbey.
In the last three years there has been an explosion of activity supporting local food on Whidbey Island. Today, we have a real opportunity to rehabilitate our whole local food system for the people who live and work on Whidbey Island.
What would a thriving local food system look like in 2020? One that could produce, process, and deliver half of the food we eat each year. Once Whidbey had a bountiful food system, sufficient for the basic needs of those who lived here. With “local food” now as popular as “organic food”âand with our assets of climate, seashore, soils, and farmersâit can benefit every one of us to work together toward reclaiming this bounty.
Many cities and counties across the United Statesâand worldâare reorienting their food systems to provide a greater percentage of daily needs locally. It's called “food sovereignty and security.” Local not only means fresh food for citizens and economic prosperity for farmers. It also means greater autonomy and sustainability.
Whidbey Island is certainly one of those special places that can achieve what so many want: healthy, fresh food grown and sold closer to home.
The first step is to bring together the local capital that abounds on Whidbey Island. That's you and other local citizens. The power of the community and the chance for achievable final goals resides in people like youâinvolved in the activities, in the thinking, in the work.
We recognize that a full day in the spring is a very valuable resource, and we promise you an excellent day on every level: informative, useful, and enjoyableâwith a delicious lunch, great networking, and the promise of clarity about actions that will help all of us prosper. Your perspective is important, as invitees represent a balance of players in our food system. We value the wisdom and experience you bring.
We also know that rehabilitating our local food system is a considerable challenge. That is why we need a day to step back and look at the big picture and develop a vision of prosperity and vitality to inspire us to do the work to get there.
Our event included a short guided meditation inviting participants to wake up in 2020 to 50 percent of our food sourced locallyâand smell the herbal tea, the breakfast cooking, to walk around, observe food growing and being sold and eaten. Then we did a World Café, where people fleshed out this vision in three successive groups of four. We then did a brainstorm where we harvested the features people saw of our 2020 system. After a yummy local lunch we did a “back casting” process in which we imagined standing in our 2020 vision and talked about the sequence of events that happened to get us there. Finally, we had an open space to form action groups.
At the end of your event, celebrate your guests and the day . . . and go home and see what happens.
On a neighboring island, Orcas, a group has hosted a Food Charrette. Rhea Miller, the spark plug for the event, sent me her description of it in an e-mail:
Set a format to inspire, inform, and incite action for increasing access to healthy, local food. Form a small group of interested stakeholders ahead of time, to determine what windows of opportunity are presenting themselves. These opportunities are translated into work groups for the charrette. A winter day, often in February when folks are beginning to think about gardens again, is chosen for the charrette to ensure that farmers can be present. The day begins with inspiring video shorts, online food quizzes, and our community's story of food so far, always mindful that there may be people present who are new to the topic. Then the whole group self-selects into smaller work groups, at times using the Conversation Café protocol. The first year the work groups focused on growing grain, supporting the school's Farm and Garden program, and assessing our local food shed. The second year there were groups focused on a community food processing center or commercial kitchen and addressing hunger in the community. The latest charrette addressed the need for a GMO-free county and the formation of a seed library/bank. A healthy lunch is provided for a small fee. The day closes with feedback to the larger group. One charrette additionally closed with a plant and seed exchange, as well as desserts. Each charrette keeps in mind the needs of the local community.
Write a story or report based on the day. This becomes the property of each member of the group so new ideas and initiatives can be born of what is present.
Remember the unwelcome wisdom that “everything takes longer than you think it will” and trust that under the surface much is growing and bubbling.
Naturalist Paul Krapfel, in his small, self-published book,
Shifting,
describes an experience of sitting out a rainstorm in a cave. Trapped for quite a while, he had time to observe the drops aggregate into rivulets that formed little channels for the water to flow. Then he noticed that if he moved just a few grains of sand, the whole flood plain of rivulets shifted. He learned that while you can't stop the rain, you can redirect the flow. He wondered if such microshifts could actually heal a damaged landscapeâlike a parched, denuded vacant lot in Los Angeles deeply rutted by runoff. Rather than come in with bulldozers and seeds to make the lot green again, Krapfel observed the flow of water across this patch of land and, moving handfuls of sand here and there, fanned the water out, filling ruts, making hospitable nooks for passing seeds to root. Eventually the gullies were gone, the grass returned, and the lot had become a meadow, a living system.
This is how our change feels to me: that slowly, grain by grain, gain by gain, we are restoring our food system by working with our wealth of fertility in a spirit of natural hope.
Can we restore our regional food systems the way Krapfel restored that field? One practical visionary doing just that is my old friend Richard Conlin.
Seattle's Quiet Food Evolution
Richard is a longtime member of the Seattle City Council. Phyllis Shulman, also an old friend, is his right-hand person. It was easy to pick up the phone and make an appointment with them to find out how Seattle was moving intentionally toward a local food future. It turns out they are doing cutting-edge work in classic low-key Seattle style.
Richard and I met in 1990 at a Seattle multistakeholder sustainability dialogueânot much different from Food 2020âconvened to explore the newly minted value of sustainable development. He arrived on a bicycle and was wearing bicycle shorts, a sweaty T-shirt, and a helmet. His curly hair, whipped sideways by the wind, made him look a bit like Clarabell the Clown, but his comments were so cogent, informed, and radical without being aggressive that it is no surprise that within a decade he was on the city council. His hair is now cropped and gray, and he's become an insider, but he's still radical and so congenial and well liked, he's been able to get a lot done.
In 2008 he and Phyllis established the Local Food Action Initiative to create goals and a policy framework, and to identify specific actions to strengthen Seattle and the region's food system in a sustainable and secure way.
Slowly, quietly, and incrementally, policies shifted. A goat ordinance let people own up to three miniature goatsâas pets, lawnmowers, and dairy animals for milk and cheese. The P-Patch program expanded. Owning pot-bellied pigs became legal. Homeowners could legally use their parking strips (city property) to grow vegetables. Seattle wrote its own set of Farm Bill Principles.
SEATTLE FARM BILL PRINCIPLES
Supporting Healthy Farms, Food and People
Guidance for the 2012 Farm Bill
HEALTH-CENTERED FOOD SYSTEM
The driving principle of the Farm Bill must be the relationship of food and ecologically sound agriculture to public health. Food that promotes health includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, dairy, and lean protein. Improving the health of the nation's residents must be a priority in developing policies, programs, and funding.
SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES
Promote farming systems and agricultural techniques that prioritize the protection of the environment so that the soil, air, and water will be able to continue producing food long into the future. Integral to both domestic and global agricultural policies should be agricultural techniques and farming practices that enhance environmental quality, build soil and soil fertility, protect natural resources and ecosystem diversity, improve food safety, and increase the quality of life of communities, farmers and farm workers.
COMMUNITY AND REGIONAL PROSPERITY AND RESILIENCE
Enhance food security by strengthening the viability of small and mid-scale farms, and increasing appropriately scaled processing facilities, distribution networks, and direct marketing. Develop strategies that foster resiliency, local innovation, interdependence, and community development in both rural and urban economies. Opportunities that create fair wage jobs are key to a strong economy.
EQUITABLE ACCESS TO HEALTHY FOOD
Identify opportunities and reduce barriers by developing policies and programs that increase the availability of and improve the proximity of healthy, affordable, and culturally-relevant food to urban, suburban, and rural populations. Protect the nation's core programs that fight food insecurity and hunger while promoting vibrant, sustainable agriculture.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUITY
The policies reflected in the Farm Bill impact the lives and livelihoods of many people, both in the U.S. as well as abroad. Develop policies, programs, and strategies that support social justice, worker's rights, equal opportunity, and promote community self-reliance.
SYSTEMS APPROACH TO POLICY MAKING
It is essential to reduce compartmentalization of policies and programs, and to approach policy decisions by assessing their impact on all aspects of the food system including production, processing, distribution, marketing, consumption, and waste management. Consider the interrelated effects of policies and align expected outcomes to meet the goal of a comprehensive health-focused food system.
3
Because implementation of our Food 2020 vision seemed painfully slow to me, I asked Phyllis to give me the lowdown on how and why Seattle had made so much progress toward being a city that farms.
We met at the Grateful Bread in Seattle, the very café where friends and I started our first Conversation Café in 2001 and launched a global movement. It was a fitting place for a conversation about system change.
Phyllis outlined their winding pathway to that food security initiative. In the beginning, it wasn't about food at all. It was about Katrina. Watching the chaos was enough to send chills up the spine of a city sitting on a fault due to deliver “the big one” any day. How would Seattle cope? Richard's office asked, “What is resilience for a city, and what can a government do to foster it?”
They discovered that food is a resilience issue everyone can agree on, so food would be their focus for their resilience work. Food security would help the city withstand emergency chaos. It also linked the largest number of issues and organizations. So they convened a Local Food Action Initiative.
Eventually Richard helped convene a King County Food Policy Council in his signature styleâconvening, listening, proposing, reporting, passing ordinances, and making small projects happen again and again and again. Their 2009 FARMS (Future of Agriculture Realizing Meaningful Solutions) Report presents the findings of a study determining what measures King County should take to assure a healthy food future. Skimming it, I found a chart called, simply, “How Much Land Is Needed to Feed King County's Population?” Not a page-turner by a long shot, but in terms of my Food 2020 quest it gave me shivers of hope. They identified twenty-eight fruits and vegetables that grow well in their region. They cataloged the agricultural land still farmable in the county. They calculated potential yields for each cropâand discovered that King County could be 100 percent food secure in terms of vegetables. They could grow enough for everyone.
4
Please pause with me to say, “Wow.” Pie in the sky just became pie on the plateânice apple pie!
