Slow Food Nation: Toolkitting Sustainable Change

by Rachel Weidinger

After a fantastic lunch from Slow Food Nation vendor (and my favorite weekly treat at the Alemany Farmer Market) El Huarache Loco, I stealthily made my way back to the basement of the State Building for another of the Changemakers Day sessions: A Local Food Networks Toolkit with Deborah Kane the Vice President of Food & Farms with Ecotrust in Portland.

Whenever anyone says toolkit, they have my attention. As someone who is hungry for scalable grassroots change, I’m rather enchanted by the concept of an intentionally designed social program you can insert into culture and watch replicate virally.

The toolkit in question here grew out of the Farmer-Chef Connection, which started in Portland in started 2001. At that point, the Chef’s Collaborative was lamenting the lack of knowing local farmers, and sad that they were buying majority of farm fresh produce off the Sysco Trucks. The first Farmer-Chef Connection event had fifty people show up, half were white table cloth chefs, half were farmers. The event continued on an annual basis, growing steadily to 400-600 in the past few years. It’s now attended by farmers, food artists, fishermen, pork producers—all kinds of food producers meeting all kinds of food buyers—hospitals, fast food chains with 39 outlets, and the last in-state meet processor.

The Farmer-Chef Connection has grown to form the foundation of a vast regional food system. Ecotrust began to get lots of people asked for help starting their own regional Farmer-Chef Connections. The toolkit became the solution, and an intern worked with Deborah to distill seven years of knowledge. The toolkit was launched in tandem with online learning community. Several dozen of the 50 page toolkits have been purchased from Ecotrust for $35.

Rachel: What platform is the online community built on?

Deborah's response: Ning. We chose to use this solution because we had no money, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions we made. We originally thought it would be a small community of toolkit practitioners who would support each other, but it has grown beyond that. Thought people would all be toolkit downloaders and users.  Local Food Networks (an invite only network) has 700 profiles built out, and 50 discussion groups. One of which is a toolkit practitioner group. The remainder of the users are local food activists who have found the network to be useful.

Rachel: How did you make the toolkit? What do you recommend when undertaking the process of making a toolkit?

Deborah: First, define it as a project and then get an intern. My colleagues were really diligent about saving everything. There are three four inch binders about planning, calls, lists, and sponsors. We had lots of enthusiasm from the national chapter of the Chefs Collaborative, but no funding. After seven years, we’d exhausted the interest of our local funding community and have very minimal funding for this process, a $7,000 grant. The project was accomplished by one very meticulous intern, very methodical—Zoe Bradberry. Zoe looked at the documents, the archival material, and went back and interviewed key participants.  She left us to become a farmer and start the Young Farmers group. After the toolkit was drafted, we planned to work with 5-8 pilot communities. We tested it in Seattle. Memphis, California, and a few others; providing staff support to get their initial Farmer-Chef Connection events off the ground. Though we planned to provide support to Phoenix, we were unable to and they launched their event on their own.

It was great to talk with Deborah about her process of toolkitting up a successful local event for widespread recreation.  I'll be following up with her on a new project launching this fall that will connect local purveyors directly with local restaurants and groceries.  More on that soon.