What is a community & how do they function?
Check out this webinar and the learnings below to better understand what a community looks like, who makes one up and how they function.
Last updated
Check out this webinar and the learnings below to better understand what a community looks like, who makes one up and how they function.
Last updated
The community webinar shared experiences and best practices from four organisations that are working to transform the food system from the community.
These presentations can help food technology innovators identify: who make up communities, different forms that a community can take, and how communities can function, with all the complexity that may include. Understanding communities is essential to helping food tech makers to then be able to identify and approach the right community for the type of work that an innovator wants to do.
The presentations included:
From Paris: Damien Roussat representing Crisalim, a non-profit association dedicated to developing everyone’s power to act on their diet, and the collective capacity to change our food systems to face the climate, health and social crises of the 21st century.
From Milan: Alberto Piccardo representing RECUP, a project that aims to combat food waste and promote active citizenship, recovering unsold food from the markets, selecting it and sharing it with the people involved who want to participate in the project.
From Barcelona: Matias Verderau representing LICHEN, a Social Innovation Laboratory that promotes public-private-community collaboration, designing and implementing open citizen participation and engagement processes to create innovative, inclusive and committed solutions to face today’s great challenges.
From Hamburg: Andreas Pense, co-founder, and Lina Warrelman, active participant, from Was Tun!
As Damien Roussat from Crisalim put it, "You don't order citizens." In the long term (and many times the short term), it doesn't work to go to a group and tell them what their solution is. Instead, you have to go to where citizens and communities are, both physically and mentally, and work from the places they already inhabit and the motivations that they already have.
It's essential to keep in mind that as an innovator, you approach a community or citizens with the goal to collaborate, not to oblige or insist that they use your solution. As a participant or facilitator in the community, you can work with them to detect existing problems and possible intervention points. They're the ones that have the answers to those questions.
Working this way will help you to collaboratively design a solution that empowers the community by actually responding to their real challenges.
Many communities are working with different stakeholders and actors. Sometimes it's not on purpose-- in the case of Recup, they have volunteers from all ages and backgrounds-- and sometimes it's intentional-- in the case of Crisalim, they are actively working with different types of organisations to ensure they are holistically tackling their goals. Either way, working with a network of people and organisations can help make a community more resilient and inclusive.
Some communitiese are even working in distributed networks, sharing resources and support but enabling each cell to approach the work according to their unique contexts and needs.
These are essential pieces of information to keep in mind when working with a community. How can the technology you're developing strengthen the community's capacity to support itself and possible nodes? How can that information be made open so that other communities might be able to adapt it to their own contexts?
To better understand how to approach a community that is new to you and how you might work with them, we recommend that you check out the "Identifying" section and use the tools and resources in the next section. You can also check the FoodSHIFT2030's Citizen Empowerment Scheme.