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Introduction

This discussion paper draws on experience with the Local Food Systems Project (LFSP), a three-year project funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and administered by the Minnesota Food Association of Minneapolis, Minnesota.¹

The LFSP chose six sites to receive technical assistance for developing or strengthening food-policy structures (policy councils, task forces, networks, etc.) within a larger framework of encouraging community and economic development.² Two technical-assistance workshops were held, in May 1995 and June 1996. The LFSP also developed resource materials to support these and other local efforts (MFA 1997). In 1998, we hope to publish the lessons learned from the project.

Although only one effort among many, the LFSP combined several important elements. First, it assumed a broad food-systems view.³ Second, its general theoretical approach embraced political economy, community development, and structural issues (Dahlberg 1996). Third, the project team had had a variety of practical experience. We are convinced that the LFSP’s focus — on planning, organizing, and policy development — would be central to the long-term success of both local food systems and community food-security work.

Local food systems in strategic perspective

A variety of groups seeking alternative approaches to food insecurity have shown an increasing and enthusiastic interest in local food-systems work. This approach is even gaining some recognition among more traditional groups (for example, conventional

¹ The project team included Kate Clancy, founding member of the Onondaga Food System Council (New York), who is now with the Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture; Kenneth Dahlberg, LFSP Director and a professor of political science at Western Michigan University; Jan O’Donnell, Executive Director of the Minnesota Food Association; and Robert Wilson, a chief architect of the Knoxville, Tennessee, Food Policy Council.

² The six sites were Los Angeles, CA; Berkshire County, MA; a nine-county planning region around Rochester, NY; Pittsburgh, PA; Austin, TX; and Moyers, WV.

³ Basically, this means analyzing the interrelationships between levels of food system — household, neighbourhood, municipal, regional, etc. — in terms of their economic, social, health, power, access, equity, and symbolic dimensions, as well as in terms of food cycles: production (agriculture, farmland preservation, farmers’ markets, household and community gardens, and small livestock), processing, distribution (transportation, warehousing), access (physical and economic barriers to food, availability of food stores, cafes, street food, and feeding programs), food use (health, nutrition, cooking, food preservation, food safety, and food handling), food recycling (gleaning, food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens), and the waste stream (composting, garbage fed to animals, etc.).

agricultural groups; antihunger groups; and people in various academic disciplines). This raises the question whether these new local-food groups are becoming a movement. Although some (Gottlieb and Fisher 1996) think this (on the basis of the reform agendas of the groups involved), the project team has concluded (on the basis of the modest social and political support such groups enjoy) that they are not yet a movement.

This suggests that the many groups interested in food issues and food policy need to find common goals and harmonize their approaches. It is difficult to know how to develop and orchestrate a larger community effort, given the demands of modern organizational life. Yet, without a joint effort to build the theoretical, organizational, and political foundations of food-systems work, we risk being either co-opted by more traditional sectors or marginalized. The following is a broad outline of the requirements for such a larger cooperative effort.

Developing a vision

At the local level, it would be useful to conduct a visioning exercise among potential stakeholders to explore and clarify values and goals (see Hancock 1993) while getting them to think in systems terms about their local food system and its sustainability. It would also be useful to bring together representatives of the groups active in food-systems work around the country for similar visioning and goal-setting workshops. Any such workshop should be based on a federated, bottom-up vision that gives priority to local goals and needs as long as they are consistent with the requirements of sustainability at other levels.

Longer term theoretical needs

The general theoretical and empirical work on the structure and political economy of food systems should be expanded. Relatively little work done in this area has focused primarily on national and international issues, and the research would benefit from a multilevel analysis of local and regional issues. When the project team sought to do this, it learned of the great need for a practical theory. Such a theory would be aimed at helping local food-security practitioners to better understand their communities and the food needs of their communities and develop appropriate policies and programs to deal with them. Practical theories and concepts to guide organization and planning would also complement the many existing how-to manuals.

Key areas for a practical theory would be profiling, planning, organizing, and evaluation. Our resource guide (MFA 1997) provided readings and guidelines on the first three of these topics. The fourth, evaluation, was a most valuable tool for us. We used formative evaluation throughout to try to assess our progress and further objectives. In developing the final evaluation form for our six sites, we structured it to encourage the community workers to do some formative evaluation as they reviewed their progress and future goals.

At this stage, we especially realized how much we needed a practical framework or matrix to describe the key contextual parameters and organizational variables for the sites. It is hoped the following lists of these parameters and variables will benefit other groups and communities working on food planning and policy.

Key contextual parameters

1. Scale — One needs to find and show the area covered, plus its total population. These affect the prospects for intervention (distances to be traveled to meetings, numbers and types of people or organizations that need to be involved, etc.).
2. Landscape patterns — Any work with an urban–rural spectrum soon suggests that landscape patterns tell us very little about the patterns of people and land use important to local food systems. We need more useful descriptors and typologies.
3. Population patterns — These varied considerably between communities. Among the LFSP sites, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh were very concentrated; Austin was fairly concentrated; the Berkshires and West Virginia were very dispersed, and the New York site was dispersed but had one major population concentration. The question to ask in connection with this parameter is what types of organizing approach these variations suggest.
4. Socioeconomic patterns — These include the role and importance of the general economic structure of the community (whether it is diverse and to what degree it is autonomous), agriculture, various food enterprises, and social structures (patterns of race, class, poverty, etc.).
5. Food organization patterns — One needs to examine such patterns in both food-system and other food-related organizations in the community. One also needs to assess the linkages among them.

Key organizational variables

1. Leadership — It is helpful to work with more than one recognized community leader when dealing with food issues. When several leaders come from different sectors (public, private, nonprofit), they need to be aware of each other’s orientations and work styles. Ideally, leaders can work together over a long enough time to develop collaborative leadership, where tasks can be rotated or delegated with relative ease.
2. Work styles of groups — These can be seen across three somewhat-overlapping spectrums. One of these goes from an emphasis on ad hoc responses to one on strategic planning; another shows the relative emphasis given to specific projects versus developing a process to pursue change; finally, the last ranges from a project emphasis to a policy or policy-development emphasis. Experience suggests that the more community workers pursue planning, process, and policy, the more effective they will be.
3. Staff funding — All observers agree that it is crucial to have funding for full- or part-time staff exclusively devoted to food-systems work. Without this, staff time tends to be consumed in dealing with other, more immediate issues of employment.
4. Administrative approaches — The administrative approaches of key staff (and their location) are important. In some cases, key staff are also key leaders. In others, they may be different people. Administrative questions include the degree of centralization and the types of delegation preferred. Relations between leaders and staff are of obvious importance.

Various combinations of these contextual parameters and organizational variables yield different results. With a set of matrices or a typology illustrating these, local communities would be in a much better position to identify their key issues, challenges, and opportunities.

The need for capacity-building

The need for capacity-building for the food-systems community emerges out of the generally increasing interest in food systems, sparked in part by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Community Food Security Act. Six crucial elements are discussed below. The overarching challenge, however, is to find enough financial and organizational support to carry out this capacity-building.

• Networking — Few nonprofits have the resources to daily track the range of activities relevant to their interests. A web page dealing with food-systems issues would be most useful (keeping in mind that less affluent groups don’t have web access), along with support for key people to attend regional, state, or national meetings.
• Technical assistance — Whereas a web page might offer some technical assistance, a national or a set of regional hotlines would be useful to answer questions on local food systems and policy. One model for this is ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas). A more modest approach would be to develop directories or databases listing the experts on various topics.
• Leadership training — Leadership training should be recognized as both a key next step and part of longer term capacity-building, including systems thinking and practical skills in planning, organization, and policy development.
• Ongoing strategic evaluation — One or more groups should monitor the many current programs and experiments to develop summary descriptions. These should be regularly analyzed for lessons learned. Both the summaries and the lessons learned should be disseminated in print or electronic forms or both. This would require not only financial support but also a group of analysts with both theoretical and practical knowledge.
• Research on a practical theory — Nonprofits in diverse regions could do such research, but they would need staff and more general organizational support. Regional centres would be in a good position to seek interns and graduate-student assistants from area academic institutions.
• Longer term research on food systems — The two most likely locations for longer term theoretical and empirical research are academic institutions and think tanks. They each have a great deal to offer if a critical mass of knowledge can be established and the problems of disciplinary specialization (academia) and shorter term policy focus (think tanks) can be avoided.

Conclusions

Meeting the larger challenge of finding financial support for capacity-building ultimately requires the diverse groups involved in food-systems work to establish a community of interest. Separately and jointly they need to consciously think about how to strengthen the capacities of the community, particularly in terms of building common organizational infrastructures and capacity-building programs. Only as a community, with a strategic vision and new organizations and common programs, will we make progress toward more equitable, sustainable, and democratic food systems.

References

Dahlberg, K.A. 1996. World food problems: making the transition from agriculture to regenerative food systems. In Pirages, D., ed., Building sustainable societies. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, USA. pp. 257–274.

Gottlieb, R.; Fisher, A. 1996. Community food security and environmental justice: searching for a common discourse. Agriculture and Human Values, 3(3), 23–32.

Hancock, T. 1993. How to facilitate a vision workshop. Healthcare Forum Journal, 36(3), 33–34.

MFA (Minnesota Food Association). 1997. Strategies, policy approaches, and resources for local food system planning and organizing. MFA, Minneapolis, MN, USA. 378 pp.

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