What’s Next for FeedBack Nashville? An update on Transformational Pathways
FeedBack Nashville began nearly a year and a half ago with a dream of bringing our community together to envision a better food future for our city. On September 30, 2024, the first phase of FeedBack Nashville came to a close after receiving its initial round of funding from the Metro Nashville covid19 Financial Oversight Committee in May 2023. However, while this phase may be coming to a close, if we’ve learned anything through this process, it’s that our work is only just beginning!
Over the past 16 months, FeedBack Nashville brought together Nashvillians from around the city - both those who have a professional connection to food, and those who simply experience the food system through their daily lives - to have their say on what’s working, what’s not, and what their aspirations are for food, and all that it entails, in Nashville. We’ve learned about how people experience our city’s food system through storytelling and creating visual art together and through engaging in deep dialogue, tough conversations, and facilitated workshops.
On September 26 at the Nashville Farmers’ Market, FeedBack Nashville hosted a community dinner and storytelling hour, Setting the Table, to celebrate the project’s accomplishments during Phase 1, create community around food, and generate excitement for what’s next for this initiative. Nine of Nashville’s best, young BIPOC chefs created small plates that capture their passion for food in our city. Four storytellers from around the city told inspiring stories about our city’s rich foodways, from eating to growing food. Together, more than 150 community members gathered to enjoy a meal together and celebrate the future of food that’s possible for our city.
Tonya Lewis of Wonderful People Micro Farm welcomes guests into an evening of storytelling and delicious food at FeedBack Nashville’s Setting the Table event in late September 2024.
Following on the heels of Setting the Table and as we wrap up Phase 1 of FeedBack Nashville, we are excited to provide a glimpse into what’s next by providing a sneak peak of the 6 transformational pathways that were identified by our community through FeedBack Nashville activities. These pathways include:
Pathway 1: Shift the mindsets and values that inform changemaking work in Nashville, enabling alignment and action toward transformational change across all food system work, rather than in small pockets. One big idea: Create a multi-faceted campaign to socialize and embed FeedBack Nashville principles (see final report coming soon!) into the work of key actors across the food system.
Pathway 2: Seed the next generation of changemakers in Nashville’s food system, working with youth and/or deliberately intergenerational groups and experimenting with new leadership models. One big idea: A multicultural Youth Leadership Council on the future of food in Nashville, given legitimacy and meaningful power by being sponsored and hosted by an existing organization or government entity.
Pathway 3: Seek opportunities to deploy land for the benefit of the community, rather than the interests of developers - recognizing the inherently limited supply of land, and the significant value it holds for the health and wellness of a city and its residents. One big idea: A cross-sector committee supported and/or housed in local government, tasked with working on a community-centered land development plan for the next 25+ years, which is oriented around - but not limited to - moving toward a just and sustainable food future in Nashville.
Pathway 4: Build and strengthen Nashville’s weakening social fabric through the exploration of creative ‘third spaces’, while meeting the immediate need of improved food access for residents. One big idea: Establish a series of diverse third spaces where people come together to both meet their immediate food needs and engage with old and new neighbors alike to rebuild a fraying social fabric in Nashville.
Pathway 5: Harness two of the largest industries in Nashville - tourism and music & entertainment - to create positive forces for accelerating progress towards a just & sustainable food future. One big idea: Pursue a PR campaign to spark and promote a commitment from key players in Nashville’s tourism and entertainment industries to undertake coordinated action to accelerate progress toward a positive food future.
Pathway 6: Share and shift power and resources in support of a more democratized economy, oriented toward wellness, food choice, and access for all. One big idea: Pilot new business and ownership models that address fundamental economic disparities which contribute to a food system that leaves large parts of the population behind.
Thanks to Forum for the Future for designing these beautiful Pathways posters for us!
In addition to these pathways, FeedBack Nashville revealed 12 opportunity areas where there is already energy and momentum for action, and - if addressed - could ‘solve for’ multiple needs and barriers to a just and sustainable food system. Some of these opportunity areas include:
Enable routes to Nashville from regional farms…tackling the increasing challenges facing local / small-scale farmers and producers, brought about by consolidation in the ag industry and a ‘profit over people’ mentality
Improve distribution and access to desired food…tackling barriers around decision-making in zoning and land use, inequitable and declining transportation infrastructure, and the dominance of large grocery chains
Build capabilities to grow food in Nashville…tackling barriers around know-how and time required for gardening, zoning and land use / access decision-making, and need for other supportive policies
The full FeedBack Nashville final report, which will be available in the coming weeks, will introduce all 12 opportunity areas and take a deep dive into the transformational pathways outlined above. It will also include FeedBack Nashville’s systems diagnosis, which summarizes the complex opportunities and challenges of our current food system. This system diagnosis provided the groundwork to identify the transformational pathways and opportunity areas.
As we venture into Phase 2 of FeedBack Nashville, we invite you to please stay in the loop. In the coming weeks, we’ll share the final FeedBack Nashville report. We are also currently working with the FBN Steering Committee and other partner organizations to determine what our next steps are and how we will bring our community together to enact each transformational pathway and opportunity area. Last, we’re excited to share that Allison Thayer and Hanes Motsinger of The Nashville Food Project will be giving a presentation on the insights and lessons learned through FeedBack Nashville at this year’s TN Local Food Summit in December.
Transformational Pathways
The term “transformational pathways” is often used is systems change work to refer to the avenues that we can take to get from our current, status quo system to the future, transformed food system. These transformational pathways, or levers for change, are ways to unlock the potential for change that is already present in our community. In order to identify what the levers of change are in our community, FeedBack Nashville has conducted a systems diagnosis. This diagnosis consisted of a city-wide survey (with 580+ responses), 5 community listening sessions, a food system forum workshop, 20 comprehensive interviews with key stakeholders, a sense-making workshop, our Future of Food Conversation Series, a community art project, and numerous conversations and events hosted by our Steering Committee members. This mixed-methods approach gives us an in depth picture of how people are experiencing the food system, what its strengths are, where its weaknesses and stress points are. A system diagnosis helps us understand how a system works – the actors, elements, interconnections, and relationships within it. A good diagnosis questions assumptions and illuminates new insights.
In August, FeedBack Nashville hosted a day-long Pathways Workshop, designed to bring together leaders from throughout Nashville’s food system to identify transformational pathways that we can take to build a better food system. Farmers, government officials, nonprofit leaders, and others all came together to hear about the work that FeedBack Nashville has been doing.
These conversations were oriented toward action, and gave us the opportunity to reveal the areas of the systems diagnosis that are either ripe for change or that need further interrogation.
This workshop reflected the fact that this process is not a comprehensive research project - but rather is a living, participatory process intended to drive both further reflection and action. The systems diagnosis is an iterative process, a cycle of collecting data, gaining feedback, trying new things, and repeating the process as many times as necessary.
A large part of the conversations at the workshop were designed to use the systems diagnosis to identify and prioritize pathways forward for Nashville’s food system - areas where action or change needs to happen, to move from today’s system toward our envisioned future. Attendees worked to collectively identify what we think are the pathways forward, i.e. systemic solutions that have the most potential for positive, long-lasting, transformative change for Nashville's food system.
The pathways that they identified will play an important role in defining the work that FeedBack Nashville does going forward.
We want to extend a huge thank you to our hosts for the day: Green Door Gourmet. They provided the beautiful setting for our conversations and the fresh, delicious food needed the fuel them!
The Future of Food Conversation Series
The futures framework has informed FeedBack Nashville’s work in many ways, one of which is evident in our motivation for hosting, alongside Tennessee Local Food and The Nashville Food Project, the Future of Food Conversation Series. We have hosted a series of panels that are grounded in community members’ experiences and focused on imagining what Nashville’s food system could look like. We spent time diving into topics ranging from urban land use to innovate technologies to radical racial justice and equity; these futures-centric conversations allow us to pull upon our collective pasts to imagine a better future for the collective.
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to the panelists and moderators who have joined us at each event to share their own experiences and wisdom. We’ve heard from faith leaders, farmers, professors, business owners, chefs, and more. The food system impacts people in all corners of Nashville, people with all sorts of professions and experiences, so all people need to be a part of imagining what a better food future should look like.
These conversations have created space for our panelists and attendees to spend time imagining what a different food future could look like. What would our food system look like if we transitioned from a mindset of land ownership to one of land stewardship? What would it look like if there was no food apartheid and if racial justice was established? What would it look like if policy makers and business owners prioritized sustainability and food access as a basic human right? Challenging the status quo of our current system is one of the first steps in working towards a better one.
At each Future of Food event, attendees were given the opportunity to name one word that they think should represent a better food future. Attendees consistently voiced that they want a transformed food system, one that is characterized by accessibility and abundant, local food sources, food that is culturally relevant, fresh, and communal. We are working towards a food system that is characterized by equitable practices and deeply rooted in both modern sustainability methods and indigenous history and community. The potential for this imagined future already exists within our community; these conversations are the start of unlocking it.
While just having these conversations won’t transform our food system overnight, there is power in spending time together, in sharing our individual stories in community. Creating space for these kinds of conversations is a vital part of FeedBack Nashville’s work. We can’t have a better food system for Nashville without first taking the time to imagine what we want that future to look like.
To hear more from these conversations, access recordings of each event on YouTube here.
What is “futures” work?
Forum for the Future is one of the driving forces behind FeedBack Nashville and one of the world’s leading organizations in “futures” work. Their framework of “futures” has been a guiding principle for FeedBack Nashville’s process.
Futures - also known as futurism, the field of futures, futures studies - refers to structured, long-term thinking about the future to improve decisions made today. Futures practice supports us to grapple with uncertainty and the real change that’s happening around us. It helps us explore emerging trends and how they might interact, and to uncover where and how to act for long term success, as we consider the range of possible and preferred futures before us. The futures framework deliberately uses the plural form of the word - recognizing that the future is not fixed; at any time there are multiple futures available to us, and we can collectively shape the future we want to see.
Thinking creatively about the future also helps us step out of our ‘everyday’ - focusing less on the problems at hand and more on how the world might look and feel, if we are successful in overcoming them. Engaging in futures can unlock new ideas and inspire people to action.
Visioning is one particular approach under the umbrella of ‘futures’. Successful visioning enables people to explore what truly might be possible - beyond just incremental improvements on the system in place today. It also draws out tangible, practical statements and imagery, avoiding platitudes or being too high level to relate to, and it can help people see their own role in making their vision a reality.
The futures framework can be applied to almost any social problem or system; from climate change to housing insecurity to education systems, thinking creatively about how the future can and should look different than the present is an important part of any social change. It is easy to take aspects of our present for granted; we aren’t often encouraged to question the status quo. It is easy to go through our day to day lives and not ask questions about why grocery stores are in the locations that they are, to not wonder about where our food is coming from, to not consider what the daily lives of farmers and other food producers are like. A futures framework creates space for us to ask these questions, encourages us to ask “why” and “how” questions about our present so that we can grow into a better future.
Forum for the Future is an international organization dedicated to “enabling systemic and urgent action in three potentially game-changing areas: food, energy, and purpose of business.”" They “create impact by convening innovative collaborations to drive change, by partnering with organizations to help them lead by example, and by building a global community of pioneers and change makers.” Watch this short video to learn more about Forum for the Future’s approach to transforming the food system.
How can you engage in futures work? What aspects of our current systems do you need to call into question? If you were building an ideal future, what elements of that system would be different? Being able to imagine a better future is the first step in working towards one.
Stay tuned for our upcoming blog about the Future of Food Conversation series- events all focused on applying the futures framework to different aspects of our food system!
The Community Listening Sessions
Community Listening Sessions
FeedBack Nashville (FBN) spent the month of June hosting a series of Community Listening Sessions to understand how people are experiencing food in Nashville and get feedback on the findings of the FeedBack Nashville food system survey: a city-wide survey that received more than 600 responses.
As a part of conducting a systemic diagnosis of Nashville’s food system, FeedBack Nashville partnered with Network for Sustainable Solutions to meet with community members throughout Nashville to share the initial themes from our city-wide survey and receive community members’ feedback and suggestions on preliminary findings. In addition to multiple virtual sessions, several FeedBack Nashville Steering Committee members’ hosted in-person events at their organizations, including the Tennessee Justice Center, Urban Housing Solutions, and Healing Minds and Souls. These events enabled FBN to tap into the community knowledge present throughout these networks.
At each community listening session, community members were asked to share their perspectives and responses to two key stories and themes that emerged from synthesizing survey responses. One story, “The Story of Two Nashville’s,” highlights stark differences between two different Nashville’s. In one Nashville, people have access to plentiful, fresh, local, and delicious food. In this Nashville people own cars and can drive to grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and diverse restaurants that are abundant near their homes. In the other Nashville, almost everything about food is hard. There aren't many places close to people’s homes to buy food, especially if they don’t have a car. To get food in these parts of the city, community members often have to drive far, walk, or take public transportation, which is limited. In this Nashville, people also sometimes go hungry, and they are less likely to easily find and afford foods that match with their culture and background.
The second story, “Community Powered Food,” showcases our community’s vision for a better food future for our city, one that is defined by community agriculture, abundant and accessible local produce, limited food waste, and food accessibility and affordability for all. The story posits that this future is made possible by the 2024 Nashville residents, residents who banded together, determined to take action now to work towards a better future. The work did not happen overnight or through some perfect process; it happened through people building affordable housing that prioritized community gardens and proximity to farmers’ markets, through health care systems recognizing the importance of food as medicine and helping people access culturally relevant foods, and through everyday conversations with friends and neighbors.
Understanding both what separates and what connects these two Nashvilles and how we move forward together towards our community’s vision of “community powered food” is a vital part of working together as a community to bring forth a better food future for all Nashville residents. These sessions were filled with delicious refreshments, fruitful conversations, and poignant insights on how FeedBack Nashville’s work should move forward. Community members shared that the story of “two Nashvilles” feels accurate to them, but they also want to highlight that this division was built intentionally, that there has been a systemic prioritization of some communities and interests at the expense of others. They also shared that, because of Nashville’s explosive growth, economic and climate related volatility, and a growing number of motivated community members, the time to take substantive action towards a better food future is now. The feedback gained at these listening sessions is now being used to identify and design a series of transformational actions our community can take in the coming years to build the future we're envisioning together.