Week 1, Introduction

What is activism?

 We talk about being an activist because all eat 3 meals a day and make decisions around our meals, so we are all food activists!

Being a food activist means being a role model and an agent of change. This means supporting systemic change and community change, as well as making our own changes as an individual in our daily life. We think this is a learning experience and that we can all trial and explore alternative methods of working a food system and sharing learning on this.

This means that being a food activist means learning and thinking holistically and collaboratively. To be a food activist we need to move beyond the “us” against “them” way of working, and this means being collaborative whilst also challenging what we think isn’t right.

 This means working together and creating plans that are actionable.

 “There is no point talking about the future if it doesn’t lead to action today.”

What is co-creation?

Co-creation is, put simply, “learning and co-creating together to achieve a common and shared interest, goal or aim” – i.e. in this case the toolkit to inspire positive change.

We have chosen this because we value everyone’s input, passion, skills, knowledge and experiences and we know we do not know everything and what matters is our collective curiosity and action to shape a more resilient, proactive and regenerative food system. We also believe that to ensure this toolkit is relevant to a wider community we need to build it based on understanding our wider communities experience of food, not just our own.

We are going to do our best as facilitators to enable effective learning and sharing to take place.

As a group we defined ‘co-creation’ as:

·      “a brainstorm” everybodys ideas of the moment to be put on the table.

·      When we put the idea out there and on the table it is not whole, so people can build on it

·      “Nothing about us, without us, is for us” – everyone in the community needs to be involved in creating situations that affect them.

Creating a Mission Statement:

 A breakout group discussion on: ‘How should this toolkit be used? Or how could it be used?’

 Group 1 – We would like it to be something that is ‘visible’, something that business’ and community groups can join up to. Something that is identifiable to the public, maybe with a label or a symbol. Something applicable to both rural and urban areas, and has some kind of expression of being in progress, a working, and continuing, and constantly developing piece of work.

Group 2 – A collaborative platform to understand what organisations are doing in an area, and the food systems in areas too, and with this knowledge the toolkit could be a bridge for working together and collaboratively. Working better together across that bigger scale could mean that instead of everyone ‘firefighting’ we can work progressively and better at tackling the systemic food system issues.

Group 3 – The toolkit will be accessible and easy way for anyone from any background to follow, and learn easily. The toolkit will involve stuff that we can do in our daily lives, rather than it being this bigger issue that we cant tackle, it can help change the perspective that this is something that we can all understand and all be part of and have a role in.

Group 4 – Our basis was tackling food poverty, and teaching about where our food comes from. To showcase that you can grow your own food and inspire routes to access space to grow your own food and promote this! We want the access and opportunity to grow our own so we don’t have to be so reliant on the supermarkets being as a community we can support each other.

Group 5 – Using the toolkit to provide resources, mainly videos? Videos would be a great way to engage and find out new information. We could provide the toolkit to people so they can learn what they can do individually at home or as a community. Videos can be engaging for a wide audience.

 The manifesto has been written up as a draft here for your feedback.

Any last thoughts on the use of the toolkit:

-       The toolkit will highlight actions we can take as individuals, but it will also highlight actions we can’t take, or actions we need help to be able to take. Therefore, as well as providing actions for individuals, this toolkit will provide actions for policy makers, institutions, business’ and other organisations too.

-       Could we have this as both a ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approach, so making sure that we can engage both big organisations as well as individuals in the community.

We can share it with all sectors of society, for example, nutritionists and dieticians – they can help people engage with food in their community and supporting them in supporting clients to do that sustainably could make a big difference.

Our Attribute of the week:

Each week we are going to introducing an attribute or quality that feeds in to the ethos of the toolkit and will help us as individuals maintain and strengthen our values to work positively and proactively in our food system.

This week our attributes are:

Bold – being imaginative

Ambitious – trusting our imaginations and going for it

  Starting to create our shared imagination of what our food system will look like:

‘Yes and’….. An improvisation exercise that acknowledges everyone’s ideas and builds on them, it can help us create an imagination and highlight the potential of our collective energy.

To read our vision of the food system from this exercise please see here.

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