Webinar Recording: Good Food Box & Market Programs
Posted: December 17, 2014
Categories: Food Access / GoodFoodBites / News from Sustain Ontario
A recording of the Good Food Box & Market Programs webinar that took place on December 11th, 2014 is now available for online viewing.
Good Food Box & Market programs are ways to provide individuals and families with access to fresh fruits and vegetables through various models of centralized purchasing and coordination. The webinar brought Good Food Box & Market coordinators from across the province to share an overview of their program models, best practices, and ongoing challenges. The webinar also covered the work done by the Good Food Box Network, headed by Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition, and the potential for re-invigorating such a network to strengthen this model of food access work.
We were lucky enough to be joined by a great panel of individuals passionate about their work:
- Debbie Field, Executive Director at FoodShare offered the group a background to the model of Good Food Boxes and the history of FoodShare’s Good Food Box in Toronto that has become a model for many programs across the province.
- Ruth Ingersoll and Jim Mallabar of the Community Development Council of Quinte spoke to the growth, logistics, and the crucial volunteer power to serve Hastings and Prince Edward Counties.
- Bridget King, a public health nutritionist involved with the Sudbury & District Good Food Box, spoke to the importance of working with partners, the reach needed to serve rural areas, and the hopes of growing their program.
- Natasha Beaudin from the Ottawa Good Food Box/La Boîte verte d’Ottawa presented on the importance of having a bilingual program and of incorporating workshops and materials.
- Lorna McCue, Executive Director at the Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition, presented on the collaborative research and network building that happened in 2009-2011 to conduct an environmental scan of GFB programs, active a provincial network, and develop a business plan model.
Highlights of the discussion included how GFB programs can become even more valuable when incorporated with other kinds of food literacy and community building programs, how GFB programs have included locally grown and in-season food while keeping the priority on providing good value (the contents and infrastructure of Good Food Box programs are inherently subsidized in order to ensure affordability in contrast to other farmer-to-consumer models such as CSAs and private grocery delivery programs), and how Good Food Box & Market programs are just one of many ways that individuals and families are getting food and the hope that the value saved through a GFB can increase participants buying power elsewhere in their community.
This webinar also started the conversation of what a Good Food Box Network could offer programs across the province and what some priorities might be. There were ideas proposed that a network could, as a continuation of these presentations, be a way to share knowledge, develop common evaluation tools, collaborate on marketing and fundraising, to build new supply chains with farmers, and to build the case for provincial government and foundation interest. We are excited by the energy around re-invigorating the network and pleased to be part of ongoing discussions.
We would like to thank the presenters for sharing insights about their programs and ideas for network building and resource sharing. Thank you to all the participants for attending the event and adding to the discussion with your questions and comments. Feedback from the webinar was positive and we are excited to see how this conversation develops. As Sustain Ontario is focused on policy and systems change, we hope to support further research and evaluation of this food access model and advocacy efforts that support Good Food Box programs.
For those unable to attend, the slides from each panelist’s presentation are available on SlideShare.net/Sustain_Ontario.
This webinar was part of a series of educational webinars and discussions of the Food Access Peer Learning Circle, a project of Healthy Food for All: Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems in Ontario. The Food Access PLC hopes to be an avenue to strengthen existing collaborative networks, support initiatives on a variety of food access topics, share tools, resources, and best practices, and come to a place of agreement for government and the network to move forward on.
For more information on the Food Access PLC or any of the resources mentioned in this webinar, please contact Bronwyn Clement, bronwyn@sustainontario.ca. Our next webinar will be looking at Healthy Food Retail Initiatives; the event is planned for late January – stay tuned!