Feeding Ourselves a Method too: how conferences can be

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Feeding Ourselves a Method too: how conferences can be

The third annual Community Food conference – Feeding Ourselves – was held in Cloughjordan last weekend. I was one of the organisers, along with Ivana, Davie Kevin and loads more in Cloughjordan. Food producers made up a significant proportion of the attendees.

Along with this cohort, communities setting up or already running community food initiatives, educators and residents from Cloughjordan’s ecovillage made up most of the rest.

Community food initiatives are about people coming together to try to organise how some aspects of their food happens. This can mean, for example, that they form a group, make contact with farmers and/or growers and make a reasonably long term purchase arrangement with the farmer or grower.

In the case of Cloughjordan’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiative, 50 or so families contract a farmer (milk, meat) and a pair of growers (vegetables) to produce for them. Unusually, this is a member owned and operated initiative – most CSAs are organised by farmers looking to access more stable, committed and understanding markets. So they seek out consumers who understand that seasonal veg supply means produce is constrained some of the time, and abundant some of the time, but that farmers or growers need revenue all year round.

Duncan Stewart outlined his work on trying to develop community food and energy co-operatives. He is using a competition called “Get Involved”, in partnership with the local newspapers, to try to drive this on. He pointed out just how reliant our communities are on importing food and energy, and how this could easily be so different.

Noreen Byrne of UCC’s Centre for Co-Operative Studies pointed to the real potential for community owned shops to take off. A recent conference in the Horse and Jockey – called Counter Revolution - was attended by dozens of communities all thinking about doing what is quite normal in the UK. There, there are hundreds of community owned shops, which provide focal points for communities and add to the livelihoods of local suppliers. In the case of Tipperary’s Loughmore community shop and cafe, 16 different local suppliers are paid monthly, for the eggs, veg, crafts and whatever else they provide. A post box is the newest addition to Loughmore, thanks to the shop/cafe.

The methods used to run the event was very participatory, so everyone who attended contributed. This was a crucial difference between this event and most other conferences held. Usually a few experts, who’s work can always be read at any time anyway, dominate proceedings. From the perspective of attendees (for that is all they all – attendees not participants) the front table seem mostly committed to working out ways to reduce the input from the floor. One or two questions after the expert are about the maximum, and the clock is “always against us.”

Instead, this conference was participatory from the start. Voices from the field invited succinct contributions from the floor on who people are and what they are doing; special interest groups were formed, for growers (2 groups), educators and communities/consumers. The data from these hour long meetings was harvested for presenting to all afterwards. The content for maps of community related food initiatives were developed collaboratively, with digital mapping experts offering their services (for free) to turn this into real maps. A panel from a wide range of significant areas – academia, distribution, production - took this morning’s info and further developed what it might mean in the afternoon.

Let's let the pictures do the talking....

This whole process is respectful of the genuine on-the-ground, working-in-the-real world expertise of those who attend these conferences. It also makes the best use of a large, unique collection of people. Why most conferences aren’t run like this is beyond me.

More

A great detailed feature from Dee of Greenside up on this event and a whole lot more!

Previous features on this conference 2012 and 2013

All of Grace's pics

Cloughjordan Ecovillage

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