Kuni can help our markets

I am always scouring for new books that may help our markets to advance their system change work. One major lesson I work to keep in my front mind is how best to assist market operators in prioritizing working as networks rather than “silos.”

I have written on this subject, some of which can be found by searching in this blog under “networks”; for now, this is a good example : https://darlenewolnik.com/2021/12/20/local-resiliency-shouldnt-be-the-goal/

In many of those posts, I consider the effect of climate chaos and civil unrest on the still-fragile, but always-energetic pop up farmers market sector, and suggest that the success rate of reducing organizer and producer burnout and increasing engagement is almost entirely dependent on thinking regionally, or as you will hear later, territorially.

The idea of regionalism may seem already knit into the community food movement, but I see plenty of examples of food leaders misinterpreting true regionalism. One example is how few urban farmers market managers and volunteers visit their rural and exurban vendor farms regularly. Or, how few community food leaders speak up for regional planning issues which directly impact their farmers and other producers. And I talk to plenty of rural farmers market operators who bypass the replicable operational lessons that their urban sistren and brethren market operators have to share, or mistakenly feel they don’t need to focus on justice work.

And long before 2022, all organizers were struggling with the rapidly unfolding and difficult work of assessing and mitigating disruptions, either because they thought only hyper-locally or, didn’t define their region as expansively as it needs. For example, in 2005 when the federal levees broke after Hurricane Katrina ravaged LA and MS, my organization Market Umbrella struggled to find enough partners to rebuild our region – but not because we had not thought regionally previously, but because the region we HAD developed was entirely in the same situation. In other words, we had established a bioregion for our farmers markets (even going as far as defining our allowable vendor range as anywhere in the “American Alligator region” which spanned multiple states as the climate and agricultural products were shared with New Orleans) but in terms of truly creating organizational and community resilience, we would have benefited from deeper relationships north and west – and not just south and east – and in other sectors such as housing and transportation. (We also struggled because few other entities were able to work regionally which is part of what disaster exacerbates and why you have to have that approach before the bad day comes.) So I now know only so well that political, cultural, and even historic trade regions are as vital for food organizers to know for their own work. And while ensuring that racial justice is front and center in our work, simply ignoring those outside of our “blue” or “red” area will not serve our shared goals very well.

In terms of offering a global framework, the FAO report titled “Mapping of territorial markets; methodology and guidelines for participatory data collection” was recently recommended to me. The report essentially defines what the US calls “local” or “producer-only” markets (of course, neither of which are entirely precise) as territorial markets. From the report:
The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) defined these ‘embedded markets’ as ‘territorial markets’ (CFS, 2016a), characterized by the following criteria:
◗ They are directly linked to local, national and/or regional food systems (the vast majority of products, producers, retailers and consumers are from the given territory).
◗ They are more characterized than other markets by horizontal (i.e. non-hierarchical) relations among the various stakeholders.
◗ They are inclusive and diverse in terms of stakeholders and products.
◗ They have multiple economic, social, cultural and ecological functions within their respective territory, and are thus not limited to food supply.

◗They are the most remunerative for smallholder farmers (as compared to other kinds of market), as they offer the farmers greater bargaining power over prices.
◗ They contribute to structuring the territorial economy, creating wealth and redistributing it within the territory.
◗ They can be formal, informal or a hybrid of the two.
◗ They can be located at different levels within territories (local, national and cross-border).

What is especially instructive to me about this description is the work we have in front of us in the U.S. to ensure our farmer markets measure up to this and to other categorizations and our policy partners understand it too.

All of this chat about networks leads to a recommendation for a model encapsulated in a new book due out in October:

Kuni: A Japanese Vision and Practice for Urban-Rural Reconnection

In the book, Tsuyoshi Sekihara and Richard McCarthy take turns with descriptions and illustrations of what reimagining of the rural-urban relationship might look like and what results it could offer. Sekihara is the founder of the Kamiechigo Yamazato Fan Club, a community development organization focused on the holistic revival of Japan’s rural areas, while Richard was the founder and the longtime director of the U.S. based regional farmers market organization, Market Umbrella that I mentioned above.

“Kuni” is both a reimagining of the Japanese word for nation and an approach to reviving communities. It shows what happens when dedicated people band together and invest their hearts, minds, and souls back into a community, modeling a new way of living that actually works. A kuni can be created anywhere–even a hamlet on the verge of extinction–and embodies 7 key principles:

Everyone is equal in a kuni
Kuni is equipped with a regional management organization–a democratic organization that takes care of small public services
Kuni is a link between residents and repeat visitors
Life in a kuni is circular–consumption and production are in balance
Kuni embraces the whole person

I’ll add a bit of Wendell Berry here with how he suggested communities should also think through the appropriate scale for human centered regionalism:

“We must not outdistance local knowledge and affection, or the capacities of local persons to pay attention to details, to the “minute particulars” only by which, William Blake thought, we can do good to one another.”

Much of what Kuni (and Berry) are lifting up, we are seeing in some extraordinary US farmers markets and food work, most often led by Black, persons of color, and indigenous leaders. No surprise to me that what white-led and designed organizations are trying to figure out in the current work to become active anti-racist allies, our sisters and brothers knew already.

Chiefly among that is to eschew linear, hierarchal, purely capitalistic roles and structures for those that value the entire human, have a democratic center, and prioritize balance and inclusion. Once a community embraces that, the sky is the limit in terms of impact and organizational health. That will be the reward for listening to leaders who came to this work with system change as their goal and to those who are leading us with care and intention: that the food community thrives by establishing regional connections, valuing human-centered innovation and the realization of our shared future.

PreOrder Kuni: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781623177317

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local resiliency shouldn’t be the goal

At the end of this second year of the COVID era, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the thousands of market leaders, tens of thousands of producers, and the hundreds of thousands of our neighbors who have continued to prioritize regional food in their lives even during this horrific pandemic.

I think we had hoped that we had passed the biggest test of the COVID crisis, but it is possible that we may have a bigger one: to find the fortitude to safely withstand the succession of its outbreaks over the next few months and possibly even years while still attempting to grow the number and diversity of those able to purchase healthy food for their families. And to do that even as other shocks (climate chaos, the pitched battle over white supremacy, crumbling infrastructure) hit our communities at the same time.

People often call this being resilient.

Resilience is the ability to adapt to difficult situations. That seems straightforward, but many communities have pointed out that very adaptation can become the only action or the status quo, allowing government to rely on that resiliency rather than attempting to solve the underlying issues. Depending on the crisis or series of crises, it can be depleted and once gone, can mean catastrophe for a community by allowing outside actors to become the only arbiters of what happens during recovery.

-from the site Edge Effects:

Resiliency-based planning, however, has been opposed by grassroots organizations and activists. In 2015 in response to the City of New Orleans’s resilience strategy, posters started appearing throughout New Orleans quoting Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute. “Stop calling me resilient,” the posters read, “Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me. I am not resilient.” As (it) makes clear, instead of simply addressing the cause of environmental degradation such as land loss, Louisiana has apparently accepted the inevitability of this degradation–and is learning how to cope.

We should acknowledge and credit resiliency but insist on creating more participatory and dynamic solutions, focusing funding and efforts to those that are contextual to that place and its scope.

In terms of being contextual to that place, writer Jane Jacobs suggested that one of municipalities’ main activities be (I’m paraphrasing her here) actively replacing imported goods and ideas with regional goods and home-grown creativity whenever possible. To do what Jacobs suggested requires participatory structures and illustrative pilots for government to draw from. That ability to test multiple solutions at the community level would be one strategy that food system leaders can use in outlining as to why our work is so important to municipalities’ plans.

And whenever we talk about scale in food systems, the discussion often settles into a set of camps including (a) those who think the goal is to scale up food production to meet industrial food’s demands and (b) those who firmly believe that food is itself an antidote to scaling up, and (c/d) those who want to keep industrial food functioning and participating in local food production even as they work on alternatives and so on. The development of multiple systems may be best explained in the 2 Loops Theory of the Berkana Institute which I have written about previously that describes those roles to be played.

Also, whenever scale comes up, I think of this from Wendell Berry:

It is a formidable paradox that in order to achieve the sort of limitlessness we have begun to call sustainability, whether in human life or the other life of the ecosphere, strict limits must be observed. Enduring structures of household and family life, or the life of the community or the life of the country, cannot be formed except within limits. We must not outdistance local knowledge and affection, or the capacities of local persons to pay attention to details, to the “minute particulars” only by which, William Blake thought, we can do good to one another.

Within limits, we can think of rightness of scale. When the scale is right, we can imagine completeness of form.”

In other words, scale itself needn’t be the enemy; rightness of scale allows us to still pay attention to details, to measure how we do good to one another.

How do we find that rightness of scale?

Writer Ihnji Jon outlined a scale of political action that can serve either ever-expanding (globalized) or ever-narrowing (localized) as long as they are:

1) “subject to territorial conditions”,

2)”posses a degree of intensity that allows it to be influential across different systems”,

3) “are large enough to retain complexity that allows them to have interaction effects”

So as we think about farmers markets and community food systems, the right scale would keep the food system leaders able to pressure government to deal with the underlying issues, would encourage funding for localized active, inclusive democratic networks, would support communities to rebuild as slowly or quickly as they need and use local leadership in doing so, and most importantly would democratize all of the resources needed to create the new adapted normal. That would mean resiliency would be properly supported by functioning systems and would measure its spread as an opportunity to make real changes in that place, rather than celebrating it as a solution.

That could mean radically changing the emergency food system to reduce the bureaucracy of getting support when needed and increasing actual mutual aid, it could mean working to become the true center of inclusive civic spaces, it could mean engaging with the educational system to link regional food to childhood health, it could mean that regional climate initiatives become focused on food production and in championing the stewardship of local people…

All of that is possible, even if it is not yet probable. I hope to begin to outline examples of systemic thinking and scaled planning among farmers markets and their regional food system efforts on this site in 2022. Please share those you know about in the comments.

and lastly, I hope each of you takes some time the rest of this year to replenish your own reserves. Please do consider how you can engage with your community in ways that reduce the need for the reservoir of your resiliency to be emptied in each crisis and that increase your joy in the lovely way each of you does good to others in farmers market spaces.

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It’s a Make, Break, or Take set of moments. Get ready.

Dear Colleagues,

I am thinking of each of you, your teams, and communities as you make decisions and adapt your Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) channels. If I can help, I hope you know you can contact me and also access our FMC resources, and any updates.

Once we get get to the healing side of this pandemic, there are many things that markets may have to operationalize into best practices. Some of those we have noted already:

changing markets designation from special events to essential food and social space services.

writing rules for vendor food handling during outbreaks

having emergency layouts for smaller-than-usual markets

plans for fast pick up for items that don’t penalize the vendor with massive added fees or convert markets into something it cannot return from

communication plans for media

communication plans for vendors

partnerships for emergency situations

and of course much more to come. And as always, those ideas and solutions will come from you and your community leaders, and mostly not from an academic or government partner or from other “experts.” At FMC, our team continues to scour the internet, participate on our listservs, answer emails, and be ready to pick up the phone to learn what is going on.

This moment is reminiscent of the disasters that we worked through here in New Orleans while I was Deputy Director of Market Umbrella, and is also reminiscent of so many of our peers work on their own emergency situations. It is similar, and yet it has new wrinkles that most of us have not had to address.

That is something that I dread will be the new normal: cycles of disasters that remind us of previous examples and that we can draw from, but that bring brand-new challenges that we need to quickly assess and master too.

And as important as it is as to bravely and clearly react to the moment, how we protect our fragile community from profiteers and bureaucrats and how we prepare to share any learning for the next one is equally as important.

Make moment examples

Of course, José Andrés World Central Kitchen team is already out there. Not only is WCK immediately ready to deploy healthy food and community at the first moment necessary, the entity illustrates Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” model that is as crucial during emergencies as in everyday life. Because they are there and attract media attention, they are able to call out the policy changes that have to be made, especially challenging those that push aside local knowledge or responses. Our DTC channel organizations can clearly learn from that approach in getting media attention during these events.

“In emergencies, locals know best how to take care of their own,” Andrés said as he decried the tendency of government personnel to tell locals “how you should run your lives” when they enter disaster zones. “We need to achieve a better moment where those organizations come in to help people in America or around the world, listen to the locals more and bring them into the solution.”

Beyond the famous chefs, there are so many of these types of interveners that come to us during these moments. In New Orleans we had tens of thousands of respondents over the decade of recovery: everyone from the Rainbow Family setting up a wonderful emergency camp and doing soil mitigation right after the levee breaks to massive numbers of faith-based volunteers that came for years every summer to build houses. Be ready to spot those for this emergency: it may be someone with a better temporary space for your pop up market, a policymaker willing to suspend rules that limit the exchange of healthy foods, a school bus driver to deliver food, a fellow NGO leader with an idea for getting healthy food to more communities, or a farmer able to deliver to a multiplicity of neighborhoods or towns.

Also crucial to remind ourselves is that any make moment uses the assets and goodwill of the local community to respond, but also accounts for the length of the disaster. Some of these last days, some weeks, some months or years. COVID19’s length is still undetermined, which is deeply frightening especially as this timeline relies on a the response level of a weak medical system and a lack of a concerted response from our national government.

What those of us who have been through an emergency know is that it is vital to recognize the different phases as stages, each of which may require different responses and partners. The GoFish YouTube videos we did at MU with support from Kellogg Foundation helped us capture some of what our markets and small businesses came up with as responses and allowed us to record them across the length of that response – and not least, get those businesses money for those innovations over the long official response to Katrina.

Break moment examples

Cities closing down open-air food markets because they are viewed as events rather than as essential services are the main break moment we have to prepare to meet in this moment. In the weeks after Katrina, I was called into New Orleans City Hall (which was still set up in an eerie, blackout curtain-covered, borrowed hotel space) to defend the idea of selling food from what had been flood-covered land. What was interesting about this question from City Hall was they were unaware that most of our vendors came from the surrounding parishes outside of the levee breaks that had inundated New Orleans with water. Only three vendors were growing food in the city, and all had already sent in soil tests to LSU. So, by sharing that information and plan, we were able to move quickly past that question. And since we operated in parking lots, building renovation – which slowed other retailers down for months or for years – was not an issue that we had to deal with. The open-air and transient nature of our design absolutely helped us, taking what would have been a break moment into a make moment for our small market organization in the months and years after 2005. We never forgot that lesson for our emergency-prone area.

And we also learned that adaptation is the key. As described again by Andrés:

“If we plan too much, chances are that things are gonna be completely wrong. And once you have a plan, and everybody agrees on the plan, if the plan goes out of line, people freeze,” Andrés admitted. “Adapting always in these scenarios is gonna be more important than planning.”

So don’t let the urge to make each moment the exact right response break you.

In other words, do what market organizations do best: pilot something, learn from it quickly, adapt from its lessons and regroup.

Take moment examples

There are also what we’d down here call “carpetbaggers” in every disaster situation. Already the NYT had a story of someone hoarding tens of thousands of hand sanitizers hoping to profit from this pandemic. Luckily, online stores shut him down, although he made plenty before it happened, and there will be others who will not caught or penalized.

I have already been contacted by many online stores and developers about aiding DTC channels. Now some of them are absolutely dedicated to helping and not hurting and offering their expertise- but some are not. The wrong ones can break our small businesses with hidden fees and bad design. Good, indifferent, or bad, don’t let them take our value proposition or our message for theirs. They are still two different business models and even if we borrow from each other, we have to remind our shoppers that we will return to our model because our DTC farmers and vendors are still not able to benefit from most of those models. Use your peers to ask about these opportunities, and ask them a lot of questions too. Yes, take advantage of the right opportunity, but don’t make a good idea into a bad situation by not being careful.

Another important point is to be ready and open enough to take the gifts that will come your or your community’s way. Whether it is a a friend offering to make dinner for you, a market shopper willing to help with social media, asking a peer to get on a webinar on your market’s behalf, or stopping for a moment for a walk or to close your eyes even on a busy busy day, take it. Being givers, market leaders and vendors are loathe to take their share, but for this moment, it is vital that you do.

I just dropped some juice off to local culture bearers and small business owners who have been feeding me this week with their art and with healthy food. That was my gift to them; the fruit I used was a gift to me from neighbors and friends.

the bit I left at my pals door, photographer Cheryl and musician Mark.

And I was able to harvest so much this last week due to a gift of time and help by my Vermont food system pal Jean Hamilton who was in town for the National Good Food Network meeting.

Jean up in that tree!

I’ll add more examples here as they come to me through the extraordinary, creative community of food and civic activists that make up my world. I know we will grow stronger through this trial, and hopefully rebound by reminding even more people and community leaders why local farmers and businesses and their markets, farm stands, and CSAs are vital to a resilient, healthy place.

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Veg variety expands acceptance with kids

Australia: Increased acceptance for multiple vegetables was noted during the five weeks of one study and sustained at the three-month followup. Following the study, parents reported that offering the vegetables was “very easy” or “quite easy” with the majority following the instructions provided by the study.

This study recruited 32 families with children between the ages of four and six where low consumption of vegetables was reported. Parents completed an online survey and attended an information meeting prior to participating.

Study data was collected in several ways: two dinner meals served at the research facility during which children could eat as much of the broccoli, cauliflower and green beans as they wished; changes to actual vegetables consumed at home, childcare or school recorded through food diaries; and parents reporting on usual vegetable consumption. Families introduced one vegetable served broccoli, other families tried multiple vegetables. Parents were provided with a voucher to purchase the vegetables and given instructions on portion size and cooking instructions along with tips on how to offer the vegetables. Children were served a small piece of vegetable three times a week for five weeks. A sticker was given as a reward to children trying a vegetable.

Families that offered multiple vegetables recorded an increase in consumption from .6 to 1.2 servings, while no change in consumption was observed in families serving a single vegetable or families that did not change their eating habits.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190909123713.htm

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Pirate ships, untie.

Some of you may have heard the news earlier this year that Slow Food USA’s Executive Director Richard McCarthy was stepping down from his command after six years. Of course anyone who reads this blog knows he was the founding visionary and 18-year E.D. at Market Umbrella* which is the NGO that manages the Crescent City Farmers Markets in New Orleans, and where I was lucky enough to work as Deputy Director and then as Marketshare Director for a decade. I had departed its solidity and dynamic programs in 2011, feeling as if I needed to use the skills and resources I had gained to build the field of markets across the US and to focus on Farmers Market Coalition’s development, an entity that Richard had raised the initial private funding for and had served as the first board president when it became its own 501 (c) organization. He very graciously allowed me to take most of the materials we had developed at MU to grow my consulting business (Helping Public Markets Grow) and to use it later on as the basis of my current work as part-time staff at Farmers Market Coalition.

Since his move to NYC in 2012, we have kept in regular contact. I had even attended both of the Slow Food Nations events in Denver that happened under his leadership, partly to see if there could be an alignment between the work I did with FMC and with SF, but also to experience some of the synthesis he was famous for orchestrating between NGO leaders and chefs, private foundations and practioners, savvy media types and farmers, and a slew of others who share the theory of change that put farmers and markets in the democratic center of food systems. He always introduced me with the description that I know he had carefully crafted for me: “Darlene is a market guru and my colleague from the New Orleans days of running markets…” Like much of his wordsmithing, it was carefully open-ended and charmingly odd.

Whenever we met up, it was very much as if we were back in the cramped offices of Market Umbrella, discussing both the minute details of the work to put on a market, and the systemic trends and changes we noted and those we hoped to see. I often told him that I wished he would STOP running non-profits, and start to write, speak, and work at a different level on behalf of the entire system of organizers in the food and civic systems.

Now he is happily unmoored from his tether, roaming the world looking for places to put his efforts in the coming years. My goal is getting him visiting the port of farmers markets regularly, and so I am doing my best to get him to work on a farmers market anthology with me, with part of the proceeds benefiting FMC and other worthy orgs. Maybe that will happen, but in the meantime, he is beginning to use the blog format to share his thoughts and to raise his flag.

The blog is called think like pirates, and I can offer a tiny glimmer as to why it is called that, although Richard has developed this idea in new ways since its unveiling. But here is the beginning:

Some years back, I watched a Charlie Rose episode with Tori Amos and found this resonant:

Charlie: Now, this tour with Alanis Morrissette, tell me about her. Do you like her? Do you admire her? Is she good?

Tori: She’s a lovely person, good heart. She’s good at what she does.

Charlie: That’s it?

Tori: That’s good!

Charlie: I mean… well, was there conflict, was there tension? Or was it just a lovefest?

Tori: No tension because… I think honestly, she approached me and she did it in a way that was like, “Hey, lets be creative and put two shows together, two separate shows and um… I had to bring my own production. I didn’t want to do anything where I couldn’t bring my own production because that’s not how I work. I have a pirate ship, I have a captain…

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: I’m the ship. (giggle)

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: I have loads of chefs.

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: And all sorts of people floating around. Thieves, fantastic. A few harlots.

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: All on my ship.

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: And we all had to come and be respected that, you know, no compromise on any level. and, she has her captain, she is her ship, and of course that’s how it had to be approached. And, because of that mutual respect it worked out really well.

I went to the MU office the next day and told Richard about this interview. He immediately connected to it to our work, and came up with his pirate ship anthology for markets. (It is my memory that he had long been obsessed with pirates and maybe that’s why I told him. I believe he already flew a pirate ship flag on the front of his house.)

He began to say in presentations that we have to work as pirate ships, with our own flag, shanties and crew, but mooring together when needed. One day we even came up with a button that said, “Sail Alone, Anchor Together”; I still have one and wear it to market events where it is universally understood.

So I am pleased to introduce my readers to my pal’s new blog. His writing is practical, literate and metaphorical, and will encourage you to ponder it later on that day or week. Maybe over grog on your yardarm…

Market Umbrella was previously organized as ECOnomics Institute, and was a project of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University from 1994-2008.

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Farmers and Culinarians: You Got This

Anyone who reads this blog knows that for the past 20 years I have been especially passionate about two subjects: my neighbors on the Gulf Coast and the people and work of organizing around healthy and just food systems. Since becoming a national consultant and a staff person for Farmers Market Coalition, I have continually sought ways to combine the regional and national work I am involved in with my support of local initiatives, both in food and other civic projects.

One opportunity has presented itself through a visionary neighbor of mine, Bethany Bultman. Bethany and her husband Johann are activists who founded the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic in 1998 and subsequently the New Orleans Musicians’ Assistance Foundation in 2005. Bethany is always enthusiastic about connecting people and ideas and expanding the good in New Orleans.

Recently, Bethany introduced me to their You Got This program, “a compassionate, inclusive performing arts mental health outreach program designed expressly for our creative community, including music, dance and art students, to help calm suicidal thoughts, feelings and plans by promoting optimal mental health self-care. The community at large is also encouraged to help through support and intervention.

As Bethany says so eloquently, “people who move through life with a calling often blame themselves for any failure in that calling and isolate even further.” When she strongly suggested that this program be extended to local farmers and other food community leaders, I was thrilled that she had brought this to me.

Prioritizing self-care and community intervention through engaging events and resources fits so perfectly with the work that we do in farmers markets that I was on board immediately. There is no question that the issue of wellness, both physical and mental, needs to be our top priority. The numbers for all Americans in all walks of life in terms of their wellness are frightening. Added to that, farmers and harvesters and their workers are at the top of the list of the most dangerous jobs in U.S. Farm Aid has a great many resources and papers on the issues that reflect the often harsh reality of the farming life. Since 1985, they have also had a toll-free line 1-800-FARM-AID, to provide a listening ear and resources to farmers in crisis. And at the SSAWG conference happening this week, workshops like this are being offered:

Self Care Practices for Farmers — The truth is, being a farmer means you are constantly giving your energy with little time to recharge and recenter. It’s hard to find time for yourself, which can lead to a downward spiral of burnout, depression and even death. The more responsibilities you have, the more essential it is that you take care of yourself. Learn how three farmers implement self-care in their work, how to identify your emotional needs and communication style, and walk away with a few key tools that you can implement into your daily farm routine in just 10 minutes a day. Marlena Nip, Edible Schoolyard New Orleans (LA), Felicia Bell, RD & S Farm (MS), and Mark Cain, Dripping Springs Garden

Watching the very real and lovely way that You Got This offers places for the local creative community to seek help or even for the larger community to receive training to see the signs of depression or addiction among their culture bearers, I can easily see how we can add food producers to this.

So look for the beta version of Farmers and Culinarians: You Got This to begin in New Orleans. The good news is that we already have happy and well places to engage with our producers to offer an ear, resources and support: farmers markets, and the local farm delivery hubs popping up around town. In addition, many of the chefs and store owners who truly value local artistry and who care for these producers and see them regularly are also interested in being a place for this to begin.

Within Farmers and Culinarians: You Got This, I fully expect to revive one special activity from our fair trade/handmade holiday market (Festivus) that ran from 2003-2007 next to our Crescent City Farmers Market: our “Office of Homeland Serenity” which was designed to offer some respite and care, offered even before the regional horror show that began in August 2005. After the levee breaks, the OHS was even more special and useful at Festivus. I still get comments from locals about it and how they loved the set of activities and fun we added to each day.

I’ll keep you updated and please let me know about your local initiatives that are designed to build support for your producers and to extend the health and wellness offerings at farmers markets to even more neighbors.

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Farmers Markets Need Support to Collect and Use Data

For the past year and a half, I have been attempting to wrangle the last seven years of FMC’s technical assistance around market evaluation (and the last 18 for me) into some sort of timeline and “lessons learned” to present to researchers and partners interested in farmers markets and data.

The process of writing a peer-reviewed paper was new to me and my fellow authors and the entire FMC team soldiered on with me as best they could, cheering me on and adding much needed perspective and edits at different points of the process. After a year and a half of drafting and reviewing, we released the article linked below through the skill of the JAFSCD team, but also because of the support of the USDA/AMS team. I think it should be said as often as possible that the AMS team is firmly dedicated to assisting farmers markets with whatever trends that arise, and in developing programs at USDA that reflect the current conditions of markets in order to increase their ability to support family farmers and harvesters. The evaluation work is just one example of how they have watched developments and offered support where they thought applicable.
The reason for FMC to put effort into this type of academic article is to make sure that researchers see the opportunity to have market operators be part of the process around what data is collected via markets and market vendors, and how it is used. It certainly doesn’t mean that we think that all of the work to collect and clean the data should be shouldered by the markets only or that using the data is their work alone. I hope that is clear in this paper. But we DO think that market work is increasingly focused around managers and vendors making data-driven decisions, and so the way the market team spends its time and how well it analyzes and shares data also has to evolve. That isn’t our choice; that is the result of the world taking a larger interest in regional food and farming, as well as the constant pressure from the retail food sector. Many in that latter group want to cash in on the trust and authenticity we value without holding the same accountability to producers that we have. We have to fight that, and doing it with data is the best way.

Finally, we think there is still much to know about the barriers to embedding data systems for grassroots markets; this paper only covers what we have learned since 2011 and up to the beginning of 2018. Much more is constantly being learned and will be reflected in the TA we offer markets and their partners.

Please email me with comments and questions about the paper and its findings.

Dar

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FMC press release: December 18, 2018 – Collecting data at farmers markets is not a new endeavor. But until recently, the data was largely collected and used by researchers, often to understand the role farmers markets play in the broader food system. Over the last seven years, the Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) – a national nonprofit dedicated to strengthening farmers markets – has partnered with research institutions and market organizations to better understand how market organizations have begun to collect and use data.

While until recently it was rare for market organizations to participate in the collection of their own market-level data, more and more markets have reached out to FMC over the last decade for data collection technical assistance. In 2011, the organization began to identify common characteristics and impacts of market programs, and realized more research into evaluation resources and tools that could be used easily by understaffed market operators was needed.

In a new article published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD), FMC outlines the industry need behind creating the Farmers Market Metrics (Metrics) program, and a timeline of the steps and partnerships that led to the creation of the tool, as well as best practices uncovered during its development.

Key recommendations include:

Create assigned roles for the market’s data collection team, and choose training materials that set expectations for seasonal staff, volunteers, and interns to maximize time and efficiency.
Prioritize staff support to allow market leaders more time to oversee data collection.
Gain vendors’ trust in the program for sharing and storing sensitive data.
Patience and support from funders and network leaders for each market’s level of capacity and comfort with data collection.
More assistance from funders and network leaders in helping markets select metrics to collect, as well as advancing data collection training for market staff.
The use of tools such as the USDA’s Local Foods Economic Toolkit, coupled with consistent support from academic partners, will encourage market leaders to delve more deeply into economic data and to feel more confident sharing results.

“FMC’s efforts to craft a suitable set of resources and a data management system for high-functioning but low-capacity market organizations has helped many stakeholders understand and share the many positive impacts their partner markets are making,” said FMC Senior Advisor and article author Darlene Wolnik. “But our analysis concludes that there is still foundational work to be done by those stakeholders to aid these organizations in collecting and using data.”

Wolnik continued, “The good news is that market-level data collection yields important information that markets can use to improve operations, share with researchers, communicate impacts to stakeholders, advocate for and promote vendors, and more.”

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Why strong and weak ties are both necessary

A good article that describes bridging and bonding types of social capital. It is important for markets to understand which of them are at play in their market and how that depends on the market type the community is building. Basically, a person gets comfort and advice from their strong ties (bonding) and new information from weak ties (bridging) and so both are helpful for any type of behavior change.

For example, Food Access and Neighborhood/Niche market types often prioritize bonding social capital, while Flagship and Main Street market types focus on bridging social capital. There is no one answer to how to build (or to measure) social capital, but it is important for every intervention to understand the two and which is preferable based on the strategy involved.

At a time when the United States is becoming more starkly and rigidly unequal, when Americans are sorting themselves into demographically uniform clusters, we are evidence of the problem. We are, at least passively, the cause of the problem.

This is the downside of high neighborliness. It is a classic case of “bonding social capital,“ which tightens the weave of trust among people who are already alike—as opposed to “bridging social capital,” which helps generate trust among unlike groups.

Bonding capital makes for in-group loyalty and unity. But a civically healthy society depends on bridging capital, and what social scientist Mark Granovetter has called “the strength of weak ties.” America is sick today in part because the weak ties that used to be fostered by diverse neighborhoods and associations are dissipating….

The Worst Thing About Good Neighbors – CityLab

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What if Our Economic System Was Set Up to Generate Happiness?

In the design of our community food system, it is clear that our work must be coordinated with other sectors of civil society even as we do our best to remain light and fun and designed to encourage regular, easy participation. Some may assign this work under the social determinants of health but I think organizers need to be expansive and exciting with words as often as possible. Using terms such as lasting happiness and well-being as goals of our work offers that vision.

This podcast showcases Liz Ziedler, co-founder of Happy City Bristol, an organization geared towards fostering holistic happiness in Bristol, U.K., through measurement tools, workshops, and campaigns.
Lasting happiness should be our real aim for any system change and one that is articulated by a sense of community, purpose in your life, availability to nature and so on. All of these things can be helped with the community food system leading the way. ( I love her idea of “topping off the reservoir” of good times to build the resilience you need for tougher times. Wouldn’t that be a cool way to describe one impact gained from regularly attending farmers markets?)
What works helping people and places to flourish? What supports that kind of mind shift?
Here is how Happy City does their work:

– communication and campaigns: using all kinds of mediums to get people thinking, talking, sharing about well-being;
– training: get skills and habits into lives to know and use resiliency tactics;
– measurement and policy: offering an alternative to using GDP as the measurement for the individual, for communities and organizations and policymakers (Happy City Pulse). Survey of different areas of well-being, using academic and experiential knowledge to measure (loosely):
Be (emotional)
Do (behavioral
Connect (social)

HC uses the federated territory model (love the term) to help each place using Happy City’s resources maintain their own path and independence.

Their Happy City Index also measures if the right conditions exist to build well-being.

Lots of great ideas as to how to combat industrial system or commodity thinking and language and tools for us to use. The discussion in the interview about the connection of happiness, equity, and sustainability was really great. As was the talk around challenging the status quo on economic measurement through individual patterns which then leads to those engaged persons entering the political arena to work on changes at the municipal level and then to the system level.

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The Art of Noticing, and Then Creating

A wonderful interview for anyone interested in community and creativity. So anyone working in markets, food and farming.

MS. TIPPETT: And I want to — I want to bring in the word tribes that you used, because that’s another way, you’re using a word that we associate with something primitive. Right? That we think, that we thought modernity was about outgrowing.

MR. GODIN: Right.

MS. TIPPETT: You are actually really affirming that… We choose who and what we belong to. It’s not just about survival. It’s about connection and flourishing.

MR. GODIN: So, you know, in the desert or the jungle, the tribe was defined by geography alone. That you were in the tribe based on where you were born. And then if we fast-forward to, I don’t know, Mark Twain. Mark Twain would show up in a city and a thousand people would come to hear him speak. And everyone who came was in his tribe. They were in the tribe of, you know, slightly satirical, slightly jaundiced people who were also intellectuals who could engage with him. And he had never met them before, but within minutes, they were part of a congruent group who understood each other. And so if we fast-forward to today — you can take someone who hangs out in the East Village or Manhattan who has 27 tattoos — they go to Amsterdam, they can find someone in Amsterdam who talks their language and acts like them, because they’ve chosen the same set of things that excite them, and that they believe in. And we divide tribes as small a group as we want. But what the Internet has done is meant that we don’t have to get on a plane anymore to meet strangers who like us.

That — the Linux operating system, which is on a billion computers around the world, was written by a group of strangers who have never met, who are part of the same tribe. And so the challenge of our future is to say, are we going to connect and amplify positive tribes that want to make things better for all of us? Or are we going to degrade to warring tribes that are willing to bring other groups down just so they can get ahead?

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So, you know, on the way into the studio today, I passed a 1934 Rolls Royce. And in those days, if you were really rich, you bought a fancy expensive car like that. So we went through this era where you would value something that was physical. But now the things we pay extra for are connection. Right? The things we pay extra for are what are other people using — what networks can we be part of — what conference can we go to — who can we be with? And the people we choose to be with, the products and services we choose to talk about are all interesting and unique and human and real, as opposed to industrial and cheap and polished and normal.

Seth Godin — The Art of Noticing, and Then Creating – | On Being

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Apply for Vanguard gathering in Montreal

I am sure that many market leaders are also involved with their urban system too and some may be even under 40- If so, check out Next City’s annual gathering, this year in Montreal.

Vanguard is Next City’s annual gathering of 40 of the world’s best and brightest urban leaders age 40 and under. The conference is free, and the window to apply closes Monday, December 12, at midnight. Here are their top 10 reasons to throw your hat in the ring to be part of the 2017 Vanguard conference happening in Montreal, May 31 to June 3.

1. Get to know 39 amazing leaders in your generation all doing innovative work in cities across the world.

2. It’s Montreal’s 375th anniversary and the city is celebrating year-round. Vanguards will explore one of our favorite projects, Cite Memoire, a nighttime multimedia experience projected throughout Old Montreal.

3. Participate in the planning process of Montreal’s urban transport network by using MTL Trajet throughout the conference. Designed by our conference partner Concordia University, Vanguards will track their movements across the city contributing to the Smart City Action Plan.

4. Finally get your chance to not be the biggest urban planning geek in the room.

5. Visit Mount Royal, designed by the world-famous Frederick Law Olmsted.

6. Participate in the annual Big Idea Challenge, which will leave a lasting impact on the city.

7. Form deep and lasting connections within an influential network of your peers.

8. Practice your French skills amongst Montreal’s Francophiles in the heart of the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.

9. You won’t be just another tourist. Yes, there are fun photo ops, but Vanguard classes dive deep into host cities. Check out what we packed into three days in Reno in 2015.

10. After seven years of hosting the Vanguard conference, we’ve built an influential alumni group, and many past participants will be attending. You’ll get to meet them — and join that growing club.

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Facebook versus Face-to-Face

Anthony Flaccavento talks about how we lose community in clear and practical terms in this post. And yes, much of it has to do with that screen I am looking at now and the one many have in their hand some 15- 16 hours per day. I think my readers know that I like technology a great deal. I do like it, but it may be interesting to you to know that I gave up my smart phone for a texting phone – albeit one that has some ability to use the internet if absolutely needed – a few years back because a) it was too invasive b) my work had become much more office-bound and c) not having it meant I needed to rely on others to assist me once in a while.
My market organization was one of the first to equip their staff with smart phones and they were a supremely useful tool. Often though, I handed the market phone to a volunteer to monitor for me while I tried to follow these rules: spend more time roaming the market and talking to people than tweeting about it; attend and help arrange events at bowling alleys/bookstores, in parks and at senior centers to meet more of the community; and more than any other: turn off or ignore my phone when someone engaged me in a conversation.

Many Saturday mornings the line at our farmers market booth includes libertarians, quiet conservatives and liberals; readers of The Nation and folks who listen to Glen Beck. You can be sure that there are some very strong disagreements on economic, environmental and social issues in that queue. But there’s no shouting, no hateful, dogmatic pronouncements. What would happen if I stopped bagging produce and asked what everyone thought about climate change? Or Black Lives Matter? Or the president-elect? I honestly don’t know. I do think, however, that the realities we share, around food, our land and our local economy, may bind us to each other just enough that we’d actually listen, perhaps even consider a discomforting fact or two. Maybe, only maybe. Even so, compared to Facebook’s placeless world, this face-to-face community at least has a common place from which to begin the search for shared truths.

Source: As shared realities have disappeared, so have our shared truths | BottomUpEconomy

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And as important as it is as to bravely and clearly react to the moment, how we protect our fragile community from profiteers and bureaucrats and how we prepare to share any learning for the next one is equally as important.

Make moment examples

Break moment examples

Take moment examples

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Charlie: Now, this tour with Alanis Morrissette, tell me about her. Do you like her? Do you admire her? Is she good?

Tori: She’s a lovely person, good heart. She’s good at what she does.

Charlie: That’s it?

Tori: That’s good!

Charlie: I mean… well, was there conflict, was there tension? Or was it just a lovefest?

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: I’m the ship. (giggle)

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: I have loads of chefs.

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: And all sorts of people floating around. Thieves, fantastic. A few harlots.

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: All on my ship.

Charlie: Yes.

Tori: And we all had to come and be respected that, you know, no compromise on any level. and, she has her captain, she is her ship, and of course that’s how it had to be approached. And, because of that mutual respect it worked out really well.

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