FAIR food Action Planning

“I just want to acknowledge that food systems change requires full participation – and FAIR food underpins that”

This comment was from a participant at an online workshop I facilitated in early June to introduce SFP’s FAIR food Action Planner Tool. The workshop (the second of 2) aimed to tell the story of FAIR food and its co-development and to demonstrate how food partnerships could apply the framework to create their own representation and inclusion action plans.  Essentially, the plan was to take an ethos and structure and provide a taster of how it could be turned into something practical and useful.

FAIR food in a nutshell

If you haven’t already seen it, FAIR food is fully explained on the SFP website and in this FAIR food document.  In a nutshell FAIR food is SFP’s Framework for Action on Inclusion and Representation – a set of principles and a practical structure supporting food partnerships to address underrepresentation and discrimination in their food systems transformation work. It builds on SFP’s anti-racism work – under the banner of REDI for Change – by acknowledging other factors that can lead to exclusion and marginalisation from our activities.  Key underrepresented groups and communities identified by FAIR food are people who are excluded: because of their race, young people, people from low-income households, and farmers.

The Action Planner Tool

The FAIR food Action Planner Tool is a practical extension to FAIR food – an Excel workbook that allows users to prioritise where they should focus their effort and time based on what’s most important to them, what’s likely to have the greatest impact, and where they are already doing something.  The Tool encourages working groups – e.g. partnership management teams, steering groups, or engagement teams – to have conversations about which specific topics to focus on and together determine what makes most sense to them where they are.  The Tool then prompts users to document what’s already happening, what else could be happening, who needs to be involved and when it should happen – a basic action plan.

The workshops

The workshops provided a taster of what it feels like to go through this process.  Grouped into fours I asked participants to go through the prioritisation process for their own partnership – working on one theme only – and then share their reasoning.  Participants were from different partnerships from all over the UK, but still, the conversations stimulated by the process surfaced commonalities, were rich and extremely valuable demonstrating the benefits of this approach. They also suggested how similar conversations could be stimulated within food partnership teams around the UK.

Participants from as far apart as Lewisham, Dumfries and Galloway, and West Northants, Belfast and Swansea shared perspectives on who was involved in their partnerships and who was not, and differences they experienced based on context, demographics and geography. For one participant the Tool provided:

“a structure to navigate how we create trust and more representative engagement”

and indicated a focus on developing an organisational culture of listening.

Another acknowledged the importance of collaboration with organisations already connecting to key underrepresented groups and communities – avoiding re-inventing the wheel.  If you are interested in hearing more this is a link to the recording of the second workshop.

Some thoughts

I learned a lot from the 2 workshops.  Key to SFP’s approach is a recognition that action on representation and justice in our food partnerships cannot and must not be one-size-fits-all.  There is an amazing range of types, sizes, and capacity of food partnerships in the SFP network. Some have been going for over a decade and others are brand new. And some represent largely rural farming communities whilst others are located deep in the middle of huge city regions.  This is why FAIR food is a framework and not a strategy. It is not prescriptive or rigid. Rather, it allows food partnerships to engage with a set of principles, an ethos and a structure that helps them to make sense of it in their own way and where they are on their representation and justice journey as well as literally where they are located. 

As partnerships begin using FAIR food and developing action plans, we will be able to bring together a community of practice – enabling network members to share experience and approaches, learn from each other, and ultimately support better representation and justice in our food systems work.

If you want to know more or would like to discuss how Food Matters could facilitate a FAIR food Action Planning Workshop for your food partnership, please get in touch.

Ben Messer

Food Matters

SFP Lead on Representation and Justice

Ben@foodmatters.org