Recap: 2024 Community Food Security Planning Session

Land to Table hosted its second annual in-person Community Food Security Planning Session on March 6, 2024. A gathering of 27 individuals from 21 different organizations and institutions who work on building community food security throughout the North Okanagan and neighboring Shuswap region.

Who was there? Food Security Orgs and Institutions in the region.

The day was filled with networking, sharing, learning, and creative brainstorming of what the future of food security could look like in our community through collaborative efforts. To start, attendees participated in a networking activity to get to know each other.

“Land to Table is a network and look what’s been created, it’s a true network and it’s creating those connections”

Linda Boyd
Public Health Dietician

As a group, we took some time to explore the new First Nations Health Authority toolkit for Understanding Common Language, with a focus on the term Food Security.  We encourage people to continue to reference this toolkit to better understand and reflect on words we commonly use in our food systems and food security work.

Next, the hub shared updates from our spokes, the Good Food Box and Okanagan Indian Band’s Food Security Initiative, as well as updates from Land to Table as a network organization and as the steward of the Regional Community Food Hub. If you missed the event, the presentations are available here.

After sharing a delicious meal prepared by the Schubert Centre, attendees were engaged in two creative visioning activities:

  1. Brainstorming the ideal shared infrastructure to meet everyone’s programming needs.
    • The group highlighted the need for a space and vehicle to handle large amounts of food storage, processing, packing and distribution. They also named additional capacity as a necessity to making new infrastructure functional and sustainable through continuous coordination and management.
  1. Crowdsourcing a collaborative project that could showcase existing knowledge and experiences of local food in our region and invite different voices and perspectives to the conversation about our local food, food system, and food security.
    • The ideas shared all promoted food literacy through hands-on or live activities that engage people at various stages of the food system. Some common themes included cooking and sharing meals together, highlighting local food sources, and cooking diverse and culturally appropriate meals.

See below for details of what kind of infrastructure and collaborative projects the group envisioned for the future.

When asked to dream big about what infrastructure and capacity could support food security programming in the region, attendees came up with the following:

  • A 12-15,000 ft^2 food hub in the North Okanagan accessible by public transportation that can be used by multiple organizations to store and process food. Within this hub there should a be an “equipment library” where organizations can access or rent various appliances or infrastructure, including:
    • A refrigerated electric vehicle shared by organizations to transport food (recovered food, purchased food, food to clients, etc.), with a staffed driver.
    • Storage space for equipment
    • Cold storage
    • Tractor and attachments
    • Commercial kitchen with supporting classes to teach food skills to kids, schools, families, etc.
    • A food storefront where farmers can distribute their food for recovery, donation, and for sale. Food access programs can distribute coupons to the store so it’s accessible for the whole community
  • A coordinator will be needed to manage the shared infrastructure, including scheduling the use of the equipment, vehicle, and spaces available in the food hub.
  • Every Band and First Nation has a full-time food security coordinator to build a network
  • Year-round community gardens: inside, outside, and in geo-domes

Good Foodies: From Farm to Table

Professional chefs are showcased preparing a diversity of culturally appropriate meals using local foods. The chefs are filmed in front of a live audience. The videos can be shared publicly as a resource to promote food literacy. The live audience joins the chef (and potentially the farmer or producer) to share the meal after.

Shared infrastructure: This could be filmed in a shared food hub with a commercial kitchen and large shared dining space.

 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner! or Community Dinner Roadshow

This is a collective meal project supplied and supported by various people in the community. A chef is in charge of leading a community cooking class to make dinner. They will work with a local farmer to bring the majority of the food. Each session is hosted by a different organization at different locations across the North Okanagan to showcase different demographics and cultural perspectives.

 

Mentoring for Moms/Young Parents

This local food literacy program would teach new moms and young parents how to cook with different types of local produce. There would be free babysitting provided so the moms could attend. There could be a special preservation class as well to pickle/can/preserve crops when there is an abundance (e.g. zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc.)

 

Follow the Sweet Potato

This is a video campaign that follows food from seed to table, but it includes all of the different facets of the food system- waterways, volunteering, planting, harvesting, climate, processing, transportation, distribution, cooking, etc. This campaign would be released in segments to highlight the different parts of the food system in the North Okanagan and to help build community understanding and support at each “stop”. Segments include: volunteering, donating, government support, etc.

 

We Build. You Grow

The project will set up backyard garden beds for people who are interested in learning how to grow food but don’t know how to take the first step. This includes everything from building the beds, to putting in the soil, and planting the seeds. All participants need to do is to water and maintain the beds in the first year, so ideally they can enjoy a successful first harvest. In order to access the program you need to agree to a series of growing workshops and to be present for the garden building to see it in action. Master Gardeners, food system experts, farmers and knowledge keepers can host the workshops on various crops, growing techniques, and food system topics. Garden hosts can keep as much food as they can use and then will be asked to donate the remaining food back to the community.

Aside from Land to Table planning for the next fiscal year and visioning what is possible as a collective, this session was an energizing opportunity for hub partners to connect with each other. Howie McMillan, Executive Director of Shuswap Food Action Society, emphasized that we all share the opportunity to develop a guiding vision or goal for our work– that no one in our community is food insecure. This requires a cultural shift that values local food systems; the importance of feeding our community; and that everyone contributes to this vision through sharing and utilizing their wealth, knowledge, and resources. Folks were surprised at how similar the various organizations’ were in their mindset, goals, local food values, and how many organizations are working on food security. When asked to summarize their experience during the day, the group shared that the session was:

  • A valuable networking opportunity to build connections with new people in the food security sector.
“Collaborations, connections. I think that coming together in a room like this just allows for possibilities.”
  • An energetic exchange of ideas.
“I really enjoyed these new connections and I think for me it’s just exciting that there is a really positive creative energy in the room. The last little while has been a very reactive, emergency crisis management scene. This just feels like looking up, and positive, and creative. That was a gift for me today.”

Annette Sharkey
Social Planning Council for the North Okanagan

  • A place to share people’s passion for local food.
“Something that really stood out is the culture of food and what that looks like as individuals and as a collective and how that shift is possible.”
  • Helpful in identifying collaborative opportunities between organizations.
“I didn’t realize how we could coordinate, and that’s what we should do. We’re all in the same boat and trying to do almost the same thing.”

To end the event, we asked everyone to stand in a circle and share what their biggest takeaways from the day were. Below are a few examples that continue to speak to the power of gathering to plan for our collective approach in the year(s) to come.

“My big takeaway is the power of collaboration.”
“What I think has stuck out for me is what I’m calling this paradigm shift- the whole opportunity that we have to shift our community’s thinking around the importance of local food and the unacceptability of hunger. And we do that by collaborating collectively every day when we’re doing our work. There is a real need to make those shifts. And if we can work together to make that change, I think it would make our work easier.”

Land to Table will be taking the feedback and ideas from this session forward into our Regional Community Food Hub planning for this next fiscal year and as we embark on a new chapter for our organization as an official non-profit society. We also hope to incorporate feedback we received at this session into future events and gatherings, including

  • More time to network with more people
  • Bringing more farmers and producers together for food security conversations

If you would like to connect with Land to Table to discuss the Regional Community Food Hub or other food security topics, reach out to Sammy at hello@landtotablenetwork.com