Our year in Review! 2017 was a great success for the team at Sustain!
Posted: December 27, 2017
Categories: GoodFoodBites
PGP Youth Evaluations Project: Growing Out: Evaluation and Impact Youth-Grown Tools
Sustain Ontario, in partnership, with Foodshare Toronto, received a PGP grant from the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration in the evaluation stream. The project was entitled Growing Out: Evaluation and Impact Youth-Grown Tools. It intended to empower youth who participate in food programs throughout Ontario to evaluate and share their experiences of the impacts and processes of these projects, in ways that are authentic to them. Sustain and FoodShare searched for experienced consultants that had worked with northern and indigenous communities, youth and food systems to help shape and build the project.
Youth were recruited by and from four partner organizations in the food sector in two different communities, Roots to Harvest in Thunder Bay; and Greenest City, Green Thumbs Growing Kids, and FoodShare all in Toronto. Sustain Ontario and FoodShare, as the lead partners coordinated and provided administrative support for this project, with the other partners all forming part of the project steering committee.
The project built the youth food, environment and employment sector capacity in just and meaningful ways. Indigenous youth, youth leaders and youth participants from diverse backgrounds, and the partner organizations have all worked together since June 2017 as co-creators of an evaluation plan, indicators of success, and culturally and demographically appropriate evaluation tools. The core youth team were trained as evaluators and appropriate tools and methods were co-created. Here are the tools the youth focused on:
- Greenest City- Journey Map, Surveys, Interviews. Youth learned how to animate during this project which led to 64 additional hours to develop the skills to use the technology!
- Green Thumbs Growing Kids- URY participants, online survey, photovoice, community members- in person survey.
- Roots to Harvest- Integrated Model: Head, Hearts and Feet integrated with photovoice and storytelling.
- Foodshare- Qualitative data- tools focus groups, integrated with 1 head heat and feet activity.
Stay tuned for our toolkit that will be coming in the new year, so you can learn how to integrate the youth led and focused evaluations into your organization!
Our consultants: The Groundswell Team!
Ruth is a listener, collector and pattern finder with a knack for making sense of where we’re at collectively and revealing new opportunity spaces for more fulfilling human experiences. Before founding Groundswell, Ruth worked with Annie Liebovitz, Bruce Mau, Urban Strategies and Decode. With a BA in Fine Art & Indigenous Studies from McMaster and a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design she’s taught design at the University of Toronto and Waterloo, OCADU and Harvard. Her projects have been featured in the Toronto Star, the Grid, MIT news, and extolled by the White House.
Groundswell brings companies and the people they serve together. Through ethnographic research and clever sense making, our nimble team sees hidden patterns that inspire resonant, contemporary communication, learning, design and strategy solutions. While our process is consistently rooted in design thinking, our methods, team, and project outcomes are bespoke, because each question we ask and each context we solve it for is unique.
Olga Semenovych
Olga is a passionate and experienced design researcher and community development professional. She has worked with diverse communities in Toronto (Parkdale, Humber Summit, Weston/Mount Dennis and Scarborough) and internationally in Jamaica, Philippines, Ethiopia and Ukraine. Olga designed and conducted monitoring and evaluation processes for these international programs. She also co-led the development of a benchmarking framework for the Ontario Summer Games Legacy Program in 2012.
Olga has a breadth of experience in stakeholder engagement and participatory research. Olga is currently teaching public participation and urban design at the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. Her teaching approach uses practice-based and action-learning methods to create an engaging learning environment. Olga’s previous experience with youth-focused programs includes designing and implementing international internship programs for recent graduates and aboriginal youth (ages 18-30) at the Canadian Urban Institute, and conducting a youth engagement strategy for a Regional Strategic Planning process in Ukraine.
Olga holds a Masters in Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape and Ecology from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Masters in Planning from the University of Waterloo, and a Bachelor in Public Affairs and Policy Management from Carleton University.
Sustain Ontario Networks
The networks, old and new, met in December 2016 to start envisioning what each network represented and what initiatives and action items they would like to focus on for the next coming years. In February, the meetings began with discussing and organizing sessions people would like to see at Bring Food Home, as well as planning what initiatives to focus on in the next coming years.
In the April meetings, the networks began to work on their chosen initiatives with the idea of creating policy position papers for each network. The April meetings also consisted of introducing the student researchers to help craft the policy position papers. In June’s meeting’s we finished planning the public facing sessions for Bring Food Home and narrowed in on the policy position papers. The next meeting was the last time the networks met virtually before meeting in-person at Bring Food Home. The meeting in September focused on the policy position papers and identifying recommendations to strengthen the Ontario food systems. At Bring Food Home network members had the chance to meet in-person to network and build on the ideas of the policy position paper. Please see below the student researchers involved with the networks and links to the policy position papers.
Student researchers worked with Sustain Ontario throughout 2017 to create policy position papers, in order to identify gaps, set direction and strength the Ontario food system. The following student researcher work on the policy position papers.
- Becky Ellis
- Julia Laforg
- Sarah Rotz
Sustainable Food Enterprise network
- Phoebe Stephens
- Amberley Ruetz
- Christopher Kelly-Bisson
- Sara Epp
- Sylvie La Forge
- Omar Elsharkawy
- Carolyn Webb
2017 Bring Food Home Conference! 
Bring Food Home 2017 was a success and we were overwhelmed at the positive and glowing responses we heard from attendees. The Bring Food Home conference was held on October 27-29th at the University of Ottawa. This event could not have been a success without the dedication and hard work of all those involved such as our partners, our committees, the University of Ottawa, the Student Researchers, our networks, all the Sponsors, speakers, volunteers and conference attendees! Thank you all for being part of the impact and adding your voice to help us move toward a brighter and more sustainable food future!
The conference was attended by 255 attendees including individuals, farmers, municipal staff, organization members, academics, and activists to work on collaborating, innovating, and building an action plan for the near future going forward to the BFH 2019 conference. The streams this year were: sustainable food enterprise; farming and farmland; food waste; municipal food policy; community growing; food justice; edible education; and Eastern Ontario local food conference. In the sessions on Friday, we discussed topics of decolonizing land and food systems, engaging communities, working with legislation, food justice, advocating for youth, governance structures, farmland, regulations, protecting farmland, removing barriers, sustainability, case studies, and new farmers. We also had a great Friday night Halloween Spooktacular Social at the Allsaints even space, filled with fantastic local foods, drinks, music, art, and of course, Halloween costumes.
Saturday was filled with a series of speakers, presentations, and collaboration sessions. The topics of discussion were diverse: the integration of anti-oppression frameworks, working with school boards, community gardens as the source of capacity building, supporting new farmers, reducing food waste, food procurement, food policy, culinary tourism as food development, interacting issues, involving youth, leveraging community resources, food policy to create change, barriers to farming, measuring success, planning seed production, tech solutions, understanding systemic inequities, engaging communities, and soil!
After closing ceremonies on Sunday and our annual AGM, we were all on our way, looking ahead to the next steps. We hope everyone was able to make some great connections, collaborate and share ideas, thoughts, and experiences with each other. You all made this possible and we can’t wait for Bring Food Home 2020.