Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
Practices
- Education and Training: decision support system, Community of Practice
- Sustainable Communities: leadership development, local and regional food systems, new business opportunities, partnerships, public participation, public policy, social networks, urban/rural integration, values-based supply chains
Abstract:
This project created a multi-state, virtual professional development community of practice (CoP), bringing together diverse leaders working on the North Central region's current and emerging food system plan/charter efforts. Together, we sought to address common challenges and strategies to foster more equitable, sustainable, diverse, and healthy local/regional food systems within and among our states.
We established the CoP with a planning committee composed of representatives from all North Central states. The planning committee included participants in food system plan/charter efforts, such as extension educators, farmers, food council members, statewide food, agriculture, health networks and organizations, and local and state policymakers and agency staff. This group collaboratively developed a series of four learning sessions, co-led by CoP members and their colleagues, allowing participants to share their knowledge and explore opportunities for collaboration across the region. Later, we developed an online hub website to house our recorded learning sessions, an interactive resource database, and a story portal. This hub will continued to be updated in the second phase of the project.
Our ultimate goal was to increase our collective knowledge and capacity to collaborate across states and strengthen local and regional food systems using an equity approach. As we neared the end of the project, we secured additional funding to continue it, building on what we've learned and opening it up nationally, inviting colleagues from other states and regions beyond the North Central to join. That project will officially launch in the fall of 2024.
Project objectives:
Activity Outputs
- Overall participation of approximately 70 individuals representing all 12 North Central states in a community of practice.
- Establishment of the online community of practice Hub, housing all the materials generated and shared throughout the project.
- Participation of five farmers from North Central states in farmer discussions and at least one farmer engaged as a workshop presenter. We were able to speak directly with five farmers from Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota. And we utilized pre-existing documentation from farmer and food systems practitioners from Michigan and Iowa.
- Exploration of new partnerships between North Central States with possibilities for seeking collaborative funding; coordinated regional outreach, communications, and/or advocacy; and data collection and/or sharing.
- One hybrid meeting with virtual attendance of 12 people and 10 people in-person, who also attended the 2023 Michigan Good Food Summit and a meeting with a national cohort of food hub leaders.
- Approximately 20% participation response in evaluation surveys. Lesson Learned: this is a figure far lower than we hoped. We are looking into ways to make evaluation a faster process, integrated into the learning session itself. That way, folks aren't having to navigate to something after a long learning session or be reminded via email multiple times. We have had some success with this method for other events.
Materials Outputs
We developed the following materials through this project:
- The farmer feedback report: A summary brief of learnings from farmer feedback focus group.
- A description of our collaborative model
- Four learning sessions: Four recordings of educational presentations, to be made available publicly.
- A resource hub: a curated list of resources used or developed by North Central state food system plans/charter initiatives
- A story hub (which we hope to continue with more support offered to participants)
- A policy action bulletin board
- An online hub to house all related material