Our Food Justice Work
By Maddie Hague, Community & Sustainability Manager
On July 29, 2020, Food Stash published our Commitment to Food Justice. Since then, we’ve been collaborating nearly everyday to learn how we can create positive social impact, as defined by our community. The method we’ve chosen to outline our path towards Food Justice is to create a Theory of Change. A Theory of Change is basically a map that shows which changes need to take place in the long, medium, and short term in order to bring about the ultimate impact we want to see. But before we can even begin to create a Theory of Change, we need to do the following:
Step 1: Define the Purpose of our Theory of Change
Food Stash wants to help create a more fair world where everyone has access to food. But there’s a big difference between Food Aid (what we’re doing now) and Food Justice (what we want to do) that we need to address in order to clarify our purpose as an organization and the reason for creating a Theory of Change.
Photo from when Food Stash recently stocked LOAF’s beautiful community fridge
Food Aid- in the form of community fridges, food banks, hampers, etc- is emergency relief. It delivers food to people who are being excluded from the food system for any number of reasons, like a lack of land to grow food on, the cost of food, or food being located in inaccessible places. However, Food Aid is precarious. If the aid were to disappear overnight (due to loss of funding for example) the people who depend on it would again lose access to this life-sustaining resource.
Photo from Food for the Rest of US, as Eric shows the fertile soil from a community garden in Kansas City.
On the flip side, Food Justice is about making our food system inclusive and treating food as a human right (rather than as a commodity). Food Justice asks why food is inaccessible for some people and removes those barriers (rather than navigating around them). To give examples of Food Justice in action, we recently hosted a screening of the film: Food for the Rest of Us. It showed that only when everyone has permanent access to food, can we truly say we have Food Security.
In order for Food Stash to progress from providing Food Aid to establishing Food Justice, we need to educate ourselves in Social Justice more broadly. So, we’ve been undergoing anti-oppression and cultural safety training through Bakau Consulting and Nahanee Creative. We’re becoming a trauma-informed organization and building mental health into our work culture. And, thanks to the Change Network, we’re gaining the skills and tools required to create advocacy campaigns for better policy, because Justice requires lasting, systemic change.
Step 2: Gather Evidence of the Need for Change & Understand our Context
Proponents of the Theory of Change method say it’s important to collect and share evidence of the existing needs and supports in your community before bringing people together to develop your Theory of Change. So we’ve spent the last two years investigating what’s needed to produce true Food Security in our community, and growing roots in our new context; the Olympic Village. At Food Stash we like to ‘do what we do best and partner for the rest,’ so we’ve relied heavily on experts to help us produce the following:
Evidence of need - to understand what interventions are needed to create Food Justice:
UBC social science students helped us understand how racism has put people at higher risk of hunger and illness.
We participated in research completed by MPNH that assessed the state of food access, needs, key stakeholders, and gaps in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
The Office of Regional and International Community Engagement is helping us develop a Community Based Participatory Research project to understand needs within our community as defined by the people experiencing food insecurity themselves.
Evidence of context - to become familiar with other supports available & the internal/external factors affecting our work:
UBC students helped us develop a staff and volunteer survey to better understand our workplace culture and internal perceptions around diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
The project with ORICE will also strengthen our connections with other support providers in our area and teach us about the past, present and future of the Olympic Village.
Evidence of effectiveness - to see how effective our interventions have been thus far at creating Food Justice:
Social Innovation Academy fellows showed us how we can start using data collection to monitor and evaluate how diverse and inclusive our current programs are and identify areas for improvement. So we are updating our intake forms for that purpose.
By refining our partner and member feedback surveys, we can also now record the ripple effects we have together. So for example, one charity partner informed us that, by receiving donated food and saving money on the food budget, they were able to employ kitchen staff, thereby providing new skills and experience. Thus, Food Aid can serve as a springboard for longer-term Food Justice.
Step 3: Agree on Intended Impact
The “intended impact” is the goal towards which everything in our Theory of Change map will be directed. We’ve stated that our purpose for creating a Theory of Change is to shift from providing Food Aid to establishing Food Justice. But what that Food Justice will look like depends on our particular context and our particular community’s needs and dreams. So, with new skills and evidence in hand, we’re ready to bring people together to more clearly define our desired outcomes, impact, and overall map for getting there.
This summer, we’ll be commencing dialogue like never before and asking our community: “what ultimate impact do you think we should strive for?” Because Justice is not about developing programs for people, it’s about developing programs with people.
Until then and forever after, we will continue to educate ourselves and stand by our Food Justice and Decolonization Commitments.
Are you curious about other Food Justice organizations that already exist in Vancouver?
Check out: