Browsing by Subject "food justice"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Planting the Seeds of Change: Germinating a Greener Future An Exercise in Co-Creation
    (Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2021-05-14) Ahlers, Kathy; Crouch, Anna; Gabb, Matthew; Wyne, Keith
    The nascent and burgeoning realm of co-creation in community formed the basis for this project. The central realm: food sovereignty and food justice organizations on the Northside of Minneapolis. Main players were Project Sweetie Pie's two principal people — the founder/executive director and the CFO, the four members of the capstone team with the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the faculty advisor, and from that center, radiating out, was an ever-widening array of other groups and individuals, working together and eventually creating six major deliverables, or outcomes. We envisioned this project, and these deliverables, as setting foundations for future work. Our goal was to create materials that could easily be edited, expanded, and updated over time to provide the greatest use to Project Sweetie Pie (PSP) and its partners. Our work should be contextualized as a first “phase” for making collaboration on food, climate, racial, social, and economic justice in Minneapolis more effective and efficient in the months and years to come. While the work described in this report further grows roots for the organization, further phases will flower and harvest the fruits of this labor to strengthen the work of PSP.
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    Social Sustainability and Reciprocity: Co-designing a Social Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (SO-LCA) framework for a food hub at the peri-urban agricultural interface
    (2023) Russell, Rosalind
    This research is grounded in sustainability, food, and people. It is a case study exploring how to holistically measure the social equity pillar of sustainable agriculture. More specifically, how to equitably measure the needs and impacts of the many stakeholders-sustaining food systems at the peri-urban agricultural interface. To explore this proof of concept, a community-design approach was utilized to develop a framework for measuring the social impact of stakeholders on and by The Good Acre, a food hub in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The community-design approach incorporated participatory action research (PAR) principles, which included interviews, routine meetings, focus groups, surveys, follow-up emails, and compensation for time and knowledge shared. The measuring of social impact involved a social organizational life cycle assessment (SO-LCA), which is an emerging methodology used to measure progress in social equity for the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SO-LCA is designed to measure how impacts are distributed and accrued across all stakeholders in a system. The stakeholders of The Good Acre include people living in and around the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA) who grow, process, package, prepare, distribute, consume, fund, govern, work, or volunteer with local food systems associated with The Good Acre. For this research, the methodology was adapted and re-imagined with the community, for the community, using PAR methods. The methodology and framework that resulted from this study is an exploratory proof of concept for modeling the reciprocal relationships stakeholders have with organizations, communities, and systems in the context of life cycle assessment and sustainability. The effectiveness of the framework should be further explored by 1) applying this methodology to a variety of agricultural organizations to capture a diversity of scales, geographies, and stakeholder priorities (re-imagining “organizations” as social networks), 2) incorporating routine surveys or other methods for soliciting continuous feedback as a metric in the SO-LCA framework to capture the dynamic needs of these social systems over time, and 3) utilizing the indicators from this process as the framework for conducting a sustainability life cycle assessment. Ultimately, this research could be used to inform more targeted and equitable policy and planning approach for agricultural systems at the peri-urban agricultural interface.