Local Food Literacy Roundtable Discussion
Posted: October 24, 2018
Categories: GoodFoodBites / News from Sustain Ontario
Greenbelt Fund photo
During Ontario Agriculture Week earlier this month, the Greenbelt Fund hosted a Local Food Literacy roundtable event to facilitate the sharing of experience and insights of tracking and measuring results of local food literacy initiatives.
“The focus of the knowledge-sharing discussion was to help determine how best to measure to what extent local food literacy has improved because of local food literacy programming,” the Greenbelt Fund shares. “Through brainstorming, discussions, expert moderation and valuable presentations, participants were able to learn from one another about good practices for evaluation methods and meaningful measurements of change.”
Carolyn Webb, on behalf of Sustain Ontario, shared the process that she had facilitated as a part of Sustain Ontario’s Bring Food Home conference in 2017. Over the course of Sustain Ontario’s 2016/17 “Local Food Literacy in Ontario Schools” project, funded by the Greenbelt Fund, it emerged that many people would like to know how to assess the impacts of their local food literacy projects, in part to be able to better advocate and make a case for their programs. People expressed a big desire to have more information, tools, indicators etc relating to local food literacy.
Carolyn presented the process that led to the Bring Food Home sessions “From Evaluation to Advocacy: Making the Case for Good Food Programs for Children and Youth”, as well as what happened during the presentation session and breakout session where the majority of breakout participants chose to discuss the need to determine priority outcomes that are worth consistent measurement. Many gaps relating to this conversation remain and so it was excellent to participate in the Greenbelt Fund’s session to explore the idea of common indicators, and move one step closer to better assessing the impacts of local food literacy education.
Read more about the event on the Greenbelt Fund blog.