Author Archives: kvines

Food System Thinking at LEAP (Local Environmental Agriculture Project) in Roanoke, VA

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By: Maureen McNamara Best, Local Environmental Agriculture Project (LEAP) (www.leapforlocalfood.org)

We all eat. So that means we all understand, value, and think about food, agriculture, and food producers, right?

As a society, our school systems and holidays still nod to our agrarian past. But for most us, our lives are not structured around soil preparation, planting time, harvest schedules, or feeding livestock. And, if at all, we only spend a couple minutes a day thinking about where our food comes—and that time is probably focused on the logistics of purchasing food from a retailer and/or consuming a prepared meal. In a complex, industrialized society— we specialize. And in that sense, the food industry is no different. But at what cost? Read more

Foodshed team learns how to establish consent instead of consensus

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By Tracy Kunkler, MS – Social Work, professional facilitator, planning consultant, and principal at http://www.circleforward.us/

Members of the AFP team sitting around a table.

Image 1 – Photo of AFP team meeting.

In the blog on May 4th, Propositions for Organizing with Complexity; Learnings from the Appalachian Foodshed Project (AFP), Nikki D’Adamo-Damery described nine propositions that emerged from the work of the AFP. Proposition #2 was: “Establish Consent instead of Consensus.” The following story describes one of the experiences that led to this proposition.

This arose when the AFP management team met to award mini-grants to on-the-ground projects that addressed community food security. The team included the principal investigators, graduate students, extension agents, and representatives from community-based organizations, and so reflected some of the diversity of the system within which they were working.  The team was using a collaborative decision-making framework, and the basis for decisions was the principle of consent. Read more

Propositions for Organizing with Complexity; Learnings from the Appalachian Foodshed Project

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by Nikki D’Adamo-Damery and Phil D’Adamo-Damery, Former Deputy Director of the AFP (2011-2016), currently serving as the Community Coordinator for the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust

Image explaining the Cynefin Framework (Snowden & Boone, 2007)

How do you create a place-based food system that is resilient, accessible, affordable, and healthy for Appalachian communities? That question was at the heart of the Appalachian Foodshed Project’s (AFP) work in West Virginia, southwest Virginia, and western North Carolina. The AFP engaged nutritionists, food distributors, sustainable agriculture experts, NGO’s, funders, government agencies, educators, producers, and community activists to creatively address food security across Central Appalachia using funding from the USDA’s AFRI* program. Over the course of 5 years, we moved beyond the search for silver bullets and easy solutions, and instead focused on how we might create the conditions for long-term, dynamic change.

In order to make this shift, we had to change the way we understood food security. Community food security is not a simple, or even a complicated, problem, even though we often treat it as such. It is complex, involving ever-moving relationships between culture, economics, environment, and policy.  In order to address this complexity, we need to find new ways of working together so that we can nimbly respond to changing dynamics. (Read more)

SNAP Seeds and Seedlings Grow Home Gardens in the Shenandoah Valley

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by Liz Kirchner, Virginia SARE Outreach Coordinator and Healthy Food Access Project, Virginia Cooperative Extension Service, Northern District

Home garden food production – even if that means a tomato in a bucket – is widely recognized to contribute to household nutrition and self-reliance. Garden produce strengthens ties between neighbors as those tomatoes are swapped, and maintains traditional foodways as gardening stories, seeds, and cooking skills are shared. However, not everybody realizes that SNAP benefits can be used to purchase seeds and seedlings, a caveat to the 1973 Farm Bill gauged to help people plant gardens. To raise awareness – and home gardens, too – Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Health Food Access program will host a series of seedling planting events with food pantry clients throughout the spring.

We will begin in May, after the frost-free date. The project goal is to send SNAP clients and other food pantry participants home with a planted seedling and a mapped list of nearby SNAP retailers who sell seedlings. Retailers identified using the ArcGIS, Google Maps, and the Buy Fresh Buy Local Guide include Walmart, some Food Lions, independent groceries, and the Staunton, Dayton, Waynesboro, and Harrisonburg Farmers’ Markets. (Continue reading)

Developing the VCE Model of Community, Local, and Regional Food Systems

By Joyce Latimer, Professor of Horticulture at Virginia Tech

Most great projects start with a model. Our model began as a draft concept that the VCE Community, Local, and Regional Food Systems (CLRFS) steering committee developed using a wide array of literature with a focus on the Whole Measures for Community Food Systems and the C.S Mott Group’s model for community-based food systems.  After several iterations within our steering committee, we tested our model in an interactive mapping exercise conducted at the 2016 VCE CLRFS Forum held in Richmond VA. Our “mapping” activity launched the day’s event by way of setting up flip charts and questions for the participants to respond to as they entered the meeting room.  Our goal was to generate feedback and shared learning about the kinds of work we do and the impacts we believe we have in our communities.  These questions and prompts included:

Q1/flip chart: From your current work, what CLRFS-related issue or project are you most excited about?

Q2/flip chart:   What one impact do you most hope to see come to light from your CLRFS-related work?

VCE Model of Community, Local, Regional Food Systems - a work in progress from the CLRFS Forum.

VCE Model of Community, Local, Regional Food Systems – a work in progress from the CLRFS Forum.

Q3/CLRFS Graphic:   Where and how do you “do” the work?

The resulting graphic with dots and post-it notes not only shows how we work together across the food system through a number of support functions and processes, but it emphasizes where this work falls along the food system value chain. Lastly, this model emphasizes the value-based impacts that stem from a growing number of projects, programs, and research initiatives that cut across our departments, offices, and historical program areas in VCE.

The Steering Committee used feedback from the mapping exercise and the Forum participants to revise the model as shown below to use as a guide to organize our food systems work as we try to understand its breadth across the Commonwealth. We still consider our model a work in progress. For a printable copy of the model, visit http://www.pubs.ext.vt.edu/content/dam/pubs_ext_vt_edu/ALCE/ALCE-154/ALCE-154-PDF.pdf.

VCE CLRFS Model as evolved with input from other groups.

VCE CLRFS Model as evolved with input from other groups.