Building Capacity for Local Foods Infrastructure Development

Building Capacity for Local Foods Infrastructure Development

Summary

Rural community food system capacity varies due to differences like local geography, infrastructure, transportation, professional networks, and more. Although community barriers differ, rural food systems do have varying levels of capacity that require different tools than those found for metropolitan-serving markets to thrive. This project utilizes the input of producers and local food advocates from three rural communities—Napoleon, North Dakota; Spearfish, South Dakota; and Bemidji, Minnesota. These communities’ experiences will guide the content and creation of the Community and Local Food Resources website that contains tools for rural communities that are developing their local food systems.

Objectives/Performance Targets

The objectives of the Building Capacity for Local Food Infrastructure Development project were:
• Establishment of collaborative partnership among ND, SD, MN local food advocates and researchers
• Establish community cohorts in each of the three states to pilot local foods innovations and infrastructure
• Cohorts participate in Learning Circles
• Convene all community cohorts for Learning Summit
• Create and disseminate innovative e-learning and online resources for community local foods

Accomplishments/Milestones

Completed to date:
Establishment of collaborative partnership among ND, SD, MN local food advocates and researchers

This project created relationships across the three-state region both on the side of the personnel in charge of overall project coordination and through the establishment of the three community cohorts. Project personnel represented the University of Minnesota Extension, North Dakota State University, The Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships, FARRMS (North Dakota), and Buy Fresh Buy Local South Dakota. Personnel initially participated in a project retreat followed by bi-weekly meetings that experimented with a variety of online web-meeting platforms finally settling on Google Hangout. Regular meetings built the capacity and professional networks of each of the participants who are now more capable of expanding and sharing services across state boundaries.
Establish community cohorts in each of the three states to pilot local foods innovations and infrastructure

Project cohorts in each community consisted of a variety of professionals that together made up a network of local and community food system advocates. Participants included farmers, ranchers, Extension educators, community development and community planning professionals, local business people, and non-profit representatives. Professionals had opportunities to network both in their local Design Thinking workshops as well as in an Aberdeen Learning Summit where representatives from each state learned about the local foods work occurring in each community.

Cohorts participate in Design Thinking Workshops

The original SARE proposal described the development of local foods learning circles in each community. The experience of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships between that time and when the project began in 2011 was that Design Thinking Workshops would better fit the needs of building community capacity and community food systems. Therefore we engaged faculty and students from the College of Design and adapted Design Thinking methodology to community food system efforts.

Beginning in November, 2011 we held Design Thinking workshops in Napoleon, North Dakota; Spearfish, South Dakota; and Bemidji, Minnesota with the intent to gain insight into the issues impacting the community food systems of these rural communities. The process of Design Thinking has gained in popularity and uses techniques designers (architects, graphic designers, product designers, etc…) employ to address complex challenges and create innovations. The process utilizes a human-centered focus that relies heavily on techniques like storytelling, drawing, and prototyping to address complicated problems and find creative solutions by using portions of the brain that are not often used in traditional problem solving techniques. In this project, Design Thinking offered a creative way to identify needs, goals, and solutions to underdeveloped community food systems.

The information gathered from these Design Thinking meetings fed into the collection and creation of resources that are soon to be available on the University of Minnesota Extension’s Community and Local Foods Resources website. In addition, these Design Thinking meetings also created a powerful opportunity for stakeholders in these rural food systems to come together and network and identify their shared barriers and solutions. Conversations in these meetings led to real-life connections that led to collaboration and future projects on the ground in these communities.

The results of the Design Thinking meetings and the recommendations that were generated from each community can be found here: http://localfoods.umn.edu/reports/1305.pdf

Convene all community cohorts for Learning Summit

In January, 2013 we sponsored a Learning Summit in conjunction with the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society’s (NPSAS) Winter Conference. Community members and stakeholders who participated in our Design Thinking workshops and others who served as advisory committee members came together at this summit to test the website and provide critical input. Participants networked and shared their experiences working on community food system issues. The cross-state networking, exposure to the Community and Local Food Resources tools, and NPSAS conference provided an intensive informational, resource rich experience that many will take home and utilize to further their work in community food systems.

Create and disseminate innovative e-learning and online resources for community local foods

Through the course of this project the team looked at various platforms to deliver e-learning and resources. This included eXtension’s Community of Practice for Community Food Systems, the Regional Partnership’s LocalFoods.umn.edu website, and ultimately the University of Minnesota Extension’s website.

We settled upon University of Minnesota Extension website and are working in collaboration with the Center for Family Development to create a comprehensive website called ‘Community and Local Food Resources’ that will feature all of the resources, tools, and videos, that have been collated and created for this project. The website features resources divided into several categories that were prominent features of the community food system issues identified in the three Design Thinking workshops that took place in the pilot communities. An additional feature of the website is a categorization of the web resources into three sections for communities that are getting started building their community food systems, for those that are building their community food system’s capacity, and those that are already well established. This structure is intended to provide relevance for communities where local food systems operate at all levels of complexity and to provide a stepping stone of references for those who wish to identify strategies for moving forward.

Remaining work:
The Community and Local Foods Resources website is currently under construction and not available for public use. We anticipate to activate the site by May 2013. We are refining and augmenting the resources based on the feedback from the participants in the Learning Summit.

In the past two years project personnel have been conducting and collecting videos to address each of the topic areas highlighted by the website. In addition, several videos were created for use in the cooking module that will be included in the website.

A variety of case will also be incorporated into the website. These case studies will investigate the effectiveness of innovative local food policies that have been implemented in rural communities throughout the upper Midwest.

Finally, a promotion plan needs to be identified and implemented among project personnel and participants in order to ensure maximum use of the web resource. Extension personnel throughout the three-state area will have access to this website with an understanding of its importance so they can promote its use among their constituents.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

The synergies created by cross-state networks will ultimately lead to an elevated awareness of the local foods efforts underway in each state. Policy barriers and solutions were shared across boundaries. Participants identified solutions and action steps to make positive changes. Relationship building also led to additional actions in an attempt to scale up the local food work through the application to a USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative grant to address rural food deserts. Although that project did not ultimately receive funding, a working partnership was established that included local food practitioners and advocates in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, and Iowa. These bonds and relationships will be utilized in the future when addressing projects to bolster rural community food systems.

Pilot new models of Extension delivery

Throughout the course of this project it became clear that there is a vast abundance of information about local and community food systems available online, in print, and in other media. Rather than add to that cacophony with newly branded resources, we decided to create a clearinghouse of reliable, high-quality resources that are responsive to the topics addressed by the pilot communities. As a result, the Community and Local Food Resources website will contain more than 300 uniquely navigable web tools, fact sheets, reports, videos, links to organizations’ websites, and toolkits. The website will be especially designed for Extension educators, community organizations, governmental entities, and food producers to increase their capacity to succeed and thrive as community food system professionals and advocates.

In Minnesota, five community food system Extension educators were hired as a direct result of the ideas developed in the USDA AFRI proposal. The purpose of those Extension educators is to serve as the regional go-to person for community food system related issues. The Extension educators will utilize the Community and Local Food Resources website to disseminate information. Additionally, the educators will be empowered to identify updated and new resources to be included in the website. Through the development of this website and the hiring of the five community food system Educators, the University of Minnesota Extension has institutionalized local food resources for producers and communities.

Evaluation

During the Aberdeen Learning Summit, project cohort members participated in a ripple effect mapping exercise. This results of this process will identify the “performance story” or activities occurring in the pilot communities’ local food systems since the Design Thinking workshops. The analysis of this information will highlight many interrelated activities and relationships that lead to actions across broad sectors. For example, since the Design Thinking workshops, community members reported more awareness of farm to school, implementation of EBT in farmers’ markets, changes in local food policies, Native American gardens, greater need to work with policy makers around food safety questions and regulations, and heightened understanding of the needs and requirements to increase local food sales.

Fill critical knowledge gaps

The Learning Summit demonstrated that the collection of resources brought together in one place will be enormously helpful for farmers and community food system professionals who do not have the time or knowledge of the broad resources available to search for each one individually. The evaluations of the website and Summit by participants showed that the website will be extremely useful and fill a deep need for information that will help people build their businesses, develop stronger markets, expand their programming, and find policy solutions that will make farming for community food systems a successful proposition.

Collaborators: