Food Security Summit (November 2023)

 

The Salt Spring Island Food Summit was held in November 2023, and had 80 attendees from across the systemic spectrum: food producers, agrologists, businesspeople, experts in housing, water, transportation, energy and mental health, government representatives and Indigenous folks from 2 of the Tribes and Nations whose territory includes Salt Spring. The session was facilitated by Dr. Joanna Ashworth, the Director of Professionals Programs and Partnerships in the Faculty of Environment at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Ashworth is a research associate with the Pacific Water Research Centre at SFU, a senior Dialogue Associate with the Wosk Centre for Dialogue, and a researcher with the SSHRC-funded project Participedia.

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Our fundamental premise was that the food problem on Salt Spring can't be solved just be food people, because it's part of an interconnected system, and virtually all parts of that system are in crisis. (In this way, our island is a microcosm for the planet, which is experiencing its own polycrisis at scale.) Therefore we had to include representatives from what are typically seen as silos - housing, water, governance, etc., not simply to think about the food problems better, but to create new relationships between the doers on our island, so that they'll become friends and solve ALL problems collaboratively. To this end, we had small group discussions but made sure to mix-and-match participants as they went from one discussion to another, so that each participant met at least 20 new people they didn't previously know. 

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We also took a hybrid approach in between just asking for a group brainstorm, which would inevitably have duplicated existing thinking and impeded quick progress toward food security, and delivering completed projects, which negates engagement and buy-in. Instead, we presented a few existing projects, ranging from concepts like 50 Farms, a decentralized farming program that blends well with emergency preparedness, to Indigenous and other projects already in progress. We then took input from the groups, and ended up with 8 projects coming out of the Summit with committed support from different subsets of those present. 

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Since then, the 50 Farms project has received a $149,000 CAD grant from the Investment Agriculture Foundation, through the Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust, and 2 island-wide food security coordinators have been hired to deliver on a plan to improve both food security and emergency preparedness. Another project that arose from the Summit had a focus on the Business of Food, and those new relationships gave rise to the idea of a food aggregation system that we'll now be working on with a grant to ThriveARB via Charmverse. Other projects, such as those with a focus on Native Plants and Marine Foods, are still gestating, but the relationships formed at the Summit are already creating change in a myriad of ways.

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We believe that relationships, not necessity, are what will make this systemic change finally take hold.