Community Food Security

Food for All:
An Ottawa Community Response

Project Activities:

Food for All is bringing together members of the community and universities in Ottawa to develop a food action plan and food assessment toolkit that will help address many of the food issues that exist in Ottawa. The recommendations in this food action plan and the food assessment toolkit will outline the steps that can be taken by different individuals, community groups, organizations, and decision makers to improve community food security in Ottawa.

To strengthen the recommendations that will come out of the Food for All process, an environmental scan of Ottawa will outline what programs exist around food in Ottawa, a review of literature will help us learn about the experiences of others who have worked towards addressing food issues and decision maker interviews will help us understand what steps we need to take to put these community ideas into action. Food for All will bring together the needs, experiences, and enthusiasm from individuals, groups and organizations in the Ottawa community by developing a food action plan and assessment toolkit through a number of food action planning conversations and the piloting of the assessment toolkit.

Environmental Scan:

The Food for All environmental scan will outline what programs exist around food in Ottawa. In 2001, the City of Ottawa and the Ottawa Food Security Group released a report called “Food Security in Ottawa: A Community Profile”. “This report present[ed] a profile of food security resources and activities in Ottawa”… with the intention to “shape the future development and direction of food policies and initiatives in the new City of Ottawa.”

Since 2001, the resources and activities around food security in Ottawa have continued to evolve. Food for All is conducting this environmental scan of food in Ottawa to get an up-to-date picture of the activities and the resources that exist in Ottawa to help address the issues of community food security.

Literature Review:

Community groups, researchers and governments across Canada, North America and the world are working to improve food security in their communities. The Food for All literature review will help us learn from the experiences of these community groups, researchers and governments as they have worked towards addressing community food security issues.

The literature review is diving deeper into the issues related to:
Food, Access and Health in Our Communities: issues related food availability, poverty, diet and health
Food and Newcomers to Canada: issues related to food faced by newcomers to Canada
Food Retail Environments: issues faced by food outlets in making food available in neighbourhoods
Food in Our Schools: issues related to food availability and education in our schools
Local Household Food Production: issues surrounding growing food for the household
Local Market Food Production: issues surrounding growing food for sale to others
Community Food Security Assessment Toolkits: issues surrounding the measuring of community food security in our communities
Community Food Security Policy: issues related to policy making around issues of community food security.

Information from the literature review component of this project will be fed into the Food Action Planning Conversations.

(Please click on each of these topic areas to find out more about the community food security issues that are covered by the heading)

Decision-Maker Interviews:

Food for All is a partnership between a broad group of individuals, community groups, agencies, and universities in Ottawa that are working towards community food security. Many of the food action plan recommendations that will come out of the Food for All process will need support from the different decision makers around these issues to be put into action. The Food for All decision-maker interviews will help us understand what steps we need to take to put these ideas into action. In Ottawa, some of the key decision-making bodies that have influence over community food security are the City of Ottawa, the National Capital Commission, and the school boards.

The decision-maker interviews are aimed at finding answers to a number of key questions that will help Food for All build our strategy for putting community food security issues onto the policy agenda. Our overarching question is,

“How should Food for All approach developing a policy in community food security in Ottawa, what problems are we going to be facing and how can we work around those problems?”

This includes finding answers to the following questions:

Where do community food security issues lie on the decision-maker priority list?
How do we make a policy idea more compelling?

From an environmental angle, poverty angle, social justice angle, health angle, economic angle, etc.?

Who are key people (staff of the decision-making body) who are respected and can move this policy forward internally?

Community Food Action Planning Conversations:

You are invited to participate in the community food action planning conversations! Join Food for All!

Food for All will bring together the needs, experiences, and enthusiasm from individuals, groups and organizations in the Ottawa community by developing a food action plan through a number of community food action planning conversations.

Between February and June of 2010, there will be a number of Food Action Planning conversations in six topic areas:

Food, Access and Health in Our Communities;
Food and Newcomers to Canada;
Food Retail Environments;
Food in Our Schools;
Household Food Production; and
Market Food Production.

These conversations are for all people in Ottawa who are interested or have concerns about their food. You are invited to join Food for All and participate in these conversations. We will find solutions to many of the food issues that exist in Ottawa and make recommendations to and working with decision makers, including the City of Ottawa, the Ottawa school boards, and the NCC on ways to improve the food system in Ottawa.

The aim of the community workshops is to create a space where people with interest in and experience with food in Ottawa can come together to:

Build a vision of what food in Ottawa can and should look like;
Identify issues which exist around food in Ottawa;
Come up with ideas to overcome those issues which exist;
Make concrete food policy/ action plan recommendations for Ottawa

Pulling together food policy / action plan recommendations for Ottawa that is representative of the needs of people in Ottawa can be quite difficult task. Food for All will guide workshop participants through 4 distinct steps that will all come together to become the food policy / action plan recommendations.

Step 1: Introduction and Vision Building
Participants will explore how food works in the Ottawa we want to live in
Step 2: Identifying Food Issue Solutions
Participants start to identify specific parts of Ottawa’s food system that could be part of a food action plan: things that work well and need to be supported and those that do not work well and need to be strengthened
Step 3: Fleshing out Food Policy / Action Plan
Participants get introduced to policies that exist in other places, identify strategic positioning of specific policy ideas, and develop policy recommendations
Step 4: Moving Policy / Action Plan Forward
Participants ratify policy recommendations that came out of step 3 and set a strategy for building support for those policy recommendations

There will be food action planning conversations in each element of community food security. For example, there will be a series of conversations around Food, Access and Health in Our Communities to build a vision, to identify food issue solutions, to flesh out a food policy / action plan and to move the policy / action plan forward. There will be completely separate conversations around Local Market Food Production, and another 4 workshops around Food in Our Schools, and so on.

Please Join Food for All
Food for All is looking for people who are interested in participating in these food action planning conversations. If you are interested in participating please think about which element of community food security interests you most and Join Food for All.

Pilot a Food Assessment Toolkit:

One of the cornerstones of reaching community food security, communities must be able to measure and monitor their community food security. Food for All will bring together individuals, groups and organizations in the Ottawa community by adapting and piloting a community food security assessment toolkit.

The Food for All food assessment toolkit will help communities to:

Better understand their community food security;
Decide on what actions to take to improve their community food security; and
Monitor whether or not their community food security improves over time.

Food for All has found a number of different assessments that have been used in other communities and is adapting bits and pieces from all of those toolkits to have an assessment tool that is relevant to Ottawa. Once the toolkit has been adapted, it will be piloted in 3 communities in Ottawa: one rural community, one urban community, and one community of interest. Exactly which communities will be involved in the pilot is still being finalized. We have an advisory committee that is going to be taking a look at this tool, but if anyone is interested in looking over the draft toolkit and give feedback to let us know. One of the things we are looking to advocate for is to have information around issues of Food, Access and Health in Our Communities to be more publicly available. Just Food is preparing an organizational assessment toolkit.