social cohesion

Race, Class, and Community in San Francisco’s Mission District – “A Time of Skinny Cows”

Great article about the (negative) relationship of the food movement to gentrification and therefore culture. We have to know the entire history of our movement (including its elitist characteristics) and acknowledge how our work has positive and negative implications on the less fortunate even as we continue to push its boundaries.
Some quotes from the article that I found useful:

“We think of gentrification principally in terms of real estate, race, and class, but I more often find that food is the thermometer reading the temperature of gentrification.”

“Much of what we call food politics today—buying local, farming organic, eating vegetarian—originally came from collectives that wanted to raise awareness about industrially produced food. The People’s Food System of the mid-’70s was a network of community food stores and small-scale food collectives that organized to take back control of food from large agricultural and chemical companies; they built direct connections to farmers to establish the first farmers’ markets. Meanwhile, the Black Panthers were hosting free community breakfasts in their neighborhoods, and Alice Walters opened Chez Panisse partly as a space to talk about politics. Various collectives shared the urban farm known as the Crossroads Community (The Farm) on Potrero Avenue at the edge of the Mission.
All this activity resulted in a paradox: as radical food politics succeeded, healthy food became commodified as elite food, proving that successful social movements can be gentrified, just like neighborhoods. The best farmers’ market in San Francisco, at the Ferry Building, is also the least affordable, and Waters’ Chez Panisse, the standard-bearer of locally grown, seasonal food, has become one of the most expensive restaurants in Berkeley.”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/arts-culture/san-franciscos-mission-district-zm0z13mazwil.aspx?page=5#ixzz2LGcdfe6r

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Empathic civilization

A great framework to think about humanity and its potential.

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Cash incentives in NYC and Memphis explained

Ah incentives. This is a great interview with NYC Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs about their cash incentive program. The Mexico model was the one that was explained to us in New Orleans back in 2006 (by the same public health researcher that is now working for NYC) and became the basis of the markets’ innovative work on the Gulf Coast which continues to this day. We understood (because of her training) that we were using cash as a short-term way to reduce significant barriers around open-air farmers markets, especially for low-income shoppers that face barriers such as lack of transportation, short market hours (that are often at odds with service workers schedules), the need to learn new shopping behavior, the perception of markets as elitist and so on.
To me, markets are in the business of incentivizing behavior change and we use many tools to that end: events, seating, music, children’s educational resources, support for farmers to grow their businesses and so on. Cash incentives are now well understood by public health activists and so were brought to our markets as an efficient way to do targeted outreach to at-risk communities. It’s not the answer to all of our market issues, but it has allowed us to regain our rightful place as the center of innovation in community food systems and to add some disciplined measurement strategies to our portfolio.

I really like how the NYC describes this in the interview; I like the analogy of the tax code as being a set of incentives as well.

The entire series Freakonomics is based on incentives as well. Check that out for a macro view of the subject.
Link to interview

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If children lose contact with nature they won’t fight for it

Good language in here for project proposals that involve taking student groups to farms and gardens. That the number of children involved in creative outdoor activities fell so quickly is shocking and can be addressed by activities that markets organize. Also, how access to nature can be a creative stimulant for later learning could also be the basis of your project for your targeted market day activities.

The remarkable collapse of children’s engagement with nature – which is even faster than the collapse of the natural world – is recorded in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, and in a report published recently by the National Trust. Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision has decreased by almost 90%. In one generation the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places in the UK has fallen from more than half to fewer than one in 10. In the US, in just six years (1997-2003) children with particular outdoor hobbies fell by half. Eleven- to 15-year-olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen.

In her famous essay the Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Edith Cobb proposed that contact with nature stimulates creativity. Reviewing the biographies of 300 “geniuses”, she exposed a common theme: intense experiences of the natural world in the middle age of childhood (between five and 12). Animals and plants, she contended, are among “the figures of speech in the rhetoric of play … which the genius in particular of later life seems to recall”.

Studies in several nations show that children’s games are more creative in green places than in concrete playgrounds. Natural spaces encourage fantasy and roleplay, reasoning and observation. The social standing of children there depends less on physical dominance, more on inventiveness and language skills. Perhaps forcing children to study so much, rather than running wild in the woods and fields, is counter-productive.

UTNE Altwire – If children lose contact with nature they won't fight for it.

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Sail alone, anchor together

A few years ago, I was watching a Charlie Rose interview with the musician, Tori Amos. She was going on tour with Alanis Morrisette and Charlie asked her how that worked, how could they combine their shows. Tori frowned in concentration and said (I’m sort of paraphrasing here):
it’s not really about merging them. Really, I’m… a pirate ship. I have a captain, I have my own mates, my own wenches…..and so does she…
That comment stuck in my mind. When I went to work the next day, I shared it Richard McCarthy,  who was then the Executive Director of Market Umbrella. We were constantly searching for metaphors for farmers market organizing to describe the way it was bending  (or could be) to becoming a true movement rather than a series of random events in towns and cities. We had collected some cool descriptions, still wondered if we had yet found the best way to describe it.
“A pirate ship. Hmmm,” he said. True to his nature as a leader who employs engaging and system-level thinking, he kept at it, coming up with a powerpoint on the pirate ship idea that he continues to refine and use in his global work with civic and food organizers.

When I’m out in the field, I find that much of what we do in markets and in food systems is duplication of the worst sort, meaning unnecessary and a time waster for overworked markets or networks, or just as bad is the an expectation that all markets or projects should operate and be measured the exact same way. Why is that, I often wondered? Why don’t markets or organizers talk more to each other, sharing more tools peer-to-peer and find the strength to resist being measured and judged by inappropriate metrics?

Well, I do know why it happens. It happens because the work of community organizing is so important to do correctly and yet so unrelenting that it is hard to find time to share. And then what should be shared and how it could be shared is often as complicated.
The Tori Amos interview spoke to that idea.

The idea that innovation and creativity is handmade and often an individual exercise, or coming from a small committed group who are learning as they go.

And that sharing is not necessarily about combining efforts, but more often about connecting when needed and not overemphasizing one set of values over another.

That individuals or small groups need some autonomy and yet, in order to build a movement there are times when building the networks is as important.

So from that Amos interview came this line that Richard and I created while standing outside of a coffeehouse:
Sail Alone, Anchor Together
Like pirate ships or if you prefer, privateer ships, markets have their own flag, their own code and their own mates. Sooner or later though, they may need to join up in order to defend themselves from other forces or come together to succeed on an issue.
How they do that is important. When they do that is important too.

The lack of a national or even a regional convening primarily for farmers markets  may be starting to hamper our efforts for long term policy changes and impair capacity building. In lieu of that, we can (and should) moor our nimble little ships to sides of elegant liner like a re-imagined public markets conference or join a strong armada such as a well-organized school food initiative when we can, but even then, when we don’t know what to share and when, it’s hard to contribute meaningfully.

We also have our own issues to talk about. What about SNAP/EBT? Disaster planning for market farmers? Training for market managers? Food safety issues? Permanent locations? Sustainable funding? Building appropriate networks for policy work? Evaluation? We need to work this stuff out together and decide how it’s appropriate to our scale.

Some market networks are lucky. They have solid food systems that they work in and grow in sustainably. But even the best need to anchor with the odd little markets and share and hear because innovation within a field often comes from unlikely sources.

And sometimes it’s as hard to get the larger, more established markets to take the time and find the right voice in which to share their ideas and plans, to do that even as they are piloting ever more complex projects.

Respect to each pirate ship must be paid by the others. Learn to spot the flags and to find ways to anchor together.

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Anti

Below, find an article about an anti-local author from Canada, of all places. Never forget these folks are out there, writing and speaking to other academics and a few decision-makers too.

My feeling is that these are the same type of folks who told us that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”, that global weather instability was “bad science’, that health care insurers know more than we do about costs and so on. A healthy suspicion of energetic movements is fine, but to limit food movements to upper middle class foodies buying fancy items is a short view of the many outcomes that come from alternative food systems. What about (to name just a few) healthier menus, soil reclamation, farmer generation, multi-cultural mapping, seasonal food increase, smarter regional planning, more public edible or low-water usage landscaping, biodiversity education, seed-saving, mental health projects, child health, social cohesion, geographical awareness?

What also occurs to me is he seem blissfully unaware that he views industrial ag as having the purpose of being for all when it is actually only for profit-making corporations. And then argues that food activists (“locavores” as he terms us) only want better food for their class and ignore the “realities” of the social woes in the larger system. I laugh aloud when I see or hear this, as I know that many, many food activists came to it from other social movements because they know it is a necessary approach for every system, whether we are talking about education, childcare, aging, anti-racism, environmental issues, immigrant reform, healthcare and so on.

Unfortunately, often we play into hands such as these with our gorgeous color photos of someone carrying a root vegetable who looks like they’re from upper-class middle America (read young, trim white person in overalls with white teeth and skin smiling from the cover of the report who tell us inside about their transformation from college kid to new farmer as they work in some “underserved” area) rather than reporting a before and after of what health crisis our citizens have saved themselves from by turning to human-scaled sustainable agriculture.
Stories should abound of activists who came to this to reclaim their health from their own degenerative medical conditions, or of those who lost the last of the soil on their farm or those who use it to engage multi-cultural communities. Or of communities organizing around cultural assets to create true wealth, and it just so happens that those assets happen to be food based.
Actually, I don’t worry too much about these writers. I don’t worry that much because I know that those we have already reached with our message so far have taken the time to consider the alternatives, so won’t be easily swayed. The audience for writers such as these may therefore even smaller than ours! And most of those who haven’t joined the good food revolution yet aren’t reading academics like this.
But as I said at the beginning, for some policymakers, this argument would be appealing. After all, inertia is an easy thing to allow. And I know that brands are powerful: there are people among us that remember being called: 1950s “reds”, 1960s “dirty hippies”, 1970s and 1980s “tree-huggers”, 1990s “angry queers” and so on. Smart people; they turned those tables and labels to their advantage and still made change in their time. Let’s do the same here. Gather data on your impact and share it widely. It’s the best way to silence the Chicken Littles of the industrial world.

Grist

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Jubilee lunches

Tens of thousands of community lunches in one weekend…

“Guests at the Big Jubilee Lunches were asked to bring food to share with their friends and neighbours, with the royal couple offering a cake that had the union flag colours.”

http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16240590

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Rehabilitating vacant lots improves urban health and safety

Details for grant proposals when you are greening a vacant lot with a new market :

Report.

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No one likes to be ignored, ever.

We can use reports like this to know how to set expectations for our own markets and their warm brand of social cohesion. In addition, it’s another way for markets to use to explain their added worth to the community.

We Feel Hurt Even When Strangers Ignore Us, Study Shows

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Toronto trip #1

I just returned from giving the keynote at the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network Market Manager Day in Toronto Canada. I know, how lucky does one person get…

Spending four days with my peers to the north taught me a great many things and confirmed some others. I will post a few different stories and highlights about the trip this week, but let me start today with some generalities:
1. The deep awareness of the importance of civil society in Canada serves the market and food system well. Those working on these issues know that in order for change to be calibrated correctly, it is important for citizens to constantly act as “civic agents.” They are not afraid to be oppositional when needed (when dealing with government especially) but also understand that they need to “assist each department in achieving their particular mandate” as eloquently stated by Barbara Emanuel, Manager of the Food Strategy at Toronto Public Health. (That civic agent term was defined again for me in an article I read on the way home in the latest Democracy: A Journal of Ideas in a series called Reclaiming Citizenship which I heartily recommend as well.)
2. Every food organizer I met on that trip understood that the farmer/producer needs to remain as the central partner in all projects. In other words, I didn’t come across lip service to the needs of the farmer. That lip service is usually found in code words or phrases such as “scaling up” or “elitist farmers markets” in food system conversations that I find myself in across North America and in other Western countries. Those code words tell you that the sayers are content to ignore the facts of the relative age and sophistication of our work and the intractable nature of the industrial food system so far.
I instead heard complex, thoughtful responses to the needs of farmers while balancing health equity needs for shoppers. I wish I found that more often in my travels.
3. A set of organizers who recognize that they all must remain at the same table. More specifically, that they all sit at the table but may not have the same menu of choices in front of them. Debbie Fields, the extraordinary Executive Director of FoodShare Toronto said as much to me about her colleague Anne Freeman (my host, the organizer of the Greenbelt Farmers Market Network and founder of the Dufferin Grove Farmers Market) “Anne and I understand that we have the same goal but have to use different avenues to get there.”
4. Internal evaluation is becoming known and necessary. I can’t wait to tell you more about the dynamic presentation (and later meeting of the mind) I experienced through Helene St. Jacques, a Food Share board member and marketing research professional showing results of the research done on behalf of the markets. . And, I look forward to doing some of that US/Canada evaluation sharing with Helene as well.

So much to tell you….

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Charming piece about European public squares

Our belief that farmers markets are for public good is based partly on this concept that many of our founders took from the European marche rather than the American. This describes the public space in Europe well in a few sentences.

http://usat.ly/IF45Py

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An Open Letter to the Food Policy Council

Dear colleagues,

I appreciated the time and courtesy you showed me today in the middle of your packed agenda. I am even more hopeful about the future of a healthy food system after listening in on your hard work. I thank you for all that you have done and promise to do.
As I traveled back home this afternoon, I decided to write out a few major points of what I attempted to get across today, in case some of it was missed by me or simply not clear in our short time together.
My work will continue to be focused on how to build public markets into a movement and their role in the larger food system. I hope my work will benefit you as I gather and analyze data to understand the typology of markets through their characteristics so that we can all better understand how to sustain them and build healthy systems through them.

In the meantime, I want to share what I know about farmers market activists; such as that the reasons for starting or managing a market are wide ranging. It could be economic need in that community or a desire to reconnect citizens or it might be to build an entire food system. In all cases, what each farmers market learns sooner or later is that balance is the key to success. Balancing producers, shoppers and community members’ needs and changing campaigns to meet those needs is the only way to lift barriers and keep people coming back to the same place to continue to have an evolving conversation. As I said today, all great markets have one thing in common: their ability to create and maintain extensive partnerships. The more partnerships (at the appropriate time!) the better.

In the serious work you have before you, you may ask how do farmers markets fit into this health and social equity paradigm you are creating. Here is what I would like you to remember:

•In every conversation we have about food systems, there is one constant. The profound need for successful producers able to work within the human scale of our emerging system. For that need, farmers markets are the best point of entry yet found for encouraging the farmer. A market can work for one, two, or more years with a farmer, patiently letting them find their level of comfort and their own skill set.
•The incredible set of skills within a market (in the farmers, managers, shoppers and partners) can ensure that innovative and (sometimes risky) food system ideas make it past pilot stage. In other words, we experiment well and as we learn to measure those experiments, sensible policy ideas appear.
•The open, democratic, nature of markets mean that true bridging and bonding happen when they are managed well. Can you think of another place the bank president and the bus driver are on the same footing and see each other as often?
•Entry-level positions are necessary for the food system to grow. As we continue to professionalize farmers market management, we will begin to see generations of food system activists in every region with real experience and know-how.

I hope we can all agree on those. The reason I bring them up is to encourage your food leaders to make those things happen. Here’s how:

•Support farmers markets ability to work over many seasons with their producers. Understand that a market farmer is often just beginning the thinking that will often take him or her to complete immersion into larger food system sales. But also grow sisters to your farmers market points of entry by encouraging other types of farmers that might be interested in wholesale or quasi wholesale. Promote CSAs, CSFs, investor circles like Slow Money, marketing cooperatives and other ideas. Realize that markets are encouraging retail farming for one set of farmers, which leaves a piece of the farming pie still covered. Who is encouraging direct marketing of wholesale farm goods at a respectable income level with the same set of criteria that farmers markets demand? (By the way, it might end up being farmers markets again- wholesale markets are cropping up in every region run by the very same organizations that manage the farmers markets.)
•Support action organizations like the Farmers Market Coalition, which is working to build and support comprehensive training for market managers and state associations. Advocate for markets to become members and avail themselves of the webinars, the Resource Library and its advocacy work. And, of course, support practioner/ research organizations like marketumbrella.org.
•Encourage the markets to get to their most useful form. Expect your markets to have proper governance, rules and regulations BUT make sure that all of it fits in with the characteristics of your state’s farmers markets. Each region comes at this slightly differently and policy should reflect that reality. And give it time to get there.
•Professionalize market management by advocating for it. All of the lofty ideas I put forth here are based on someone or a group of someones staying in one place and building it. Let me be clear- yes paid positions must be a priority, but board training and market project planning are just as important, as are sustainable income streams.
•Use the market to address the barriers that the industrial food system and surrounding systems have put in place. Issues like racial equity and the rural-urban divide can be addressed by connecting through food sovereignty. Where better to lead the nation on these issues but here? Look at http://www.foodsecurity.org and http://www.growingfoodandjustice.org to see how to address those issues.

Lastly, policy that will last will come from those markets and roadside stands and school gardens, especially if the measurement is built properly. In that vein, I am attaching the draft of the Indicator matrix that I am working on with the Farmers Market Coalition. It comes from markets and farmers, public health activists and planners. I’d love to hear your feedback and look for ways that you can pilot pieces of it.

In closing, I heartily recommend that you think about success first in terms of your front line – your farmers and market managers. I promise you – they will help you get to the finish line.

Sincerely,

Darlene Wolnik

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