HOW

All this is great, but social food projects do not organise themselves.

They happen thanks to the work of social food producers and curators.

These individuals identify neglected assets in a community – such as projects, places, or individuals – and design ways to connect them in events and enterprises.

Social food producers enable a wide variety of stakeholders to work together. As collaboration experts – people who connect people – their most valuable skills are hosting, convening, facilitating, animating, and co-ordinating.

Their work creates social infrastructure. However, because such work is not well understood by public authorities, many social food producers work project-to-project, rather than long-term.

As a result, they are often economically precarious.

The Social Food Forum identi ed a number of practical ways to address these challenges.

The online Social Food Atlas launched in Matera makes visible – and ndable – a wide variety of social food projects that, right now, have been little known – even to each other.

The Atlas will be promoted to policymakers as a repository of stories and case studies that can be used to marshal support for alternative practices that are already emerging.

Ways to measure the value created in social foods projects can also be important for policymakers.

The Forum will draw their attention to the metrics and measurement systems that already exist. Among these: True Value: Community Farms and Gardens published by the The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens in the UK; and Kilowatt Social Impact Analysis (Bilancio di Impatto).

More examples are cited in the Social Food Green Paper.

Working with city and municipal authorities is a particular priority for most social food projects.

Recycling organic solid waste into compost for urban agriculture, or green areas, can re-position food projects as critical urban infrastructure – not just as a recreational resource.

The integration of food projects into urban planning is in its infancy.

Multi-agency co-operation platforms – such as those that enable bicycle use in cities – could be emulated for social food projects, too.

To achieve the continuity, and longer time-scales, that trust-based projects need, the Forum resolved to work with locally-embedded institutions.

These range from pubs, local museums and libraries to community colleges and Folk High Schools.

Most museums have learning teams and budgets, for example.

And although budgets for learning gardens are small to non- existent, budgets for schools and classrooms persist in most governmental budgets.

A lot of useful knowledge is being created by university research networks and scholars.

Technical language, and introverted institutional cultures, means this knowledge can hard to access – but the e ort needs to be made.

The Forum will seek to collaborate with European networks that link agricultural and rural stakeholders and whose work intersects with the social food agenda.

These include SIMRA (Social Innovation In Marginalised Rural Areas); HNV Link (High Nature Value Farming); and AESOP. @ARC2020eu and @ENRD_CP

The Forum is committed to share knowledge online.

We were inspired by the the way that the knitting platform Ravelry supports a community of six million members.

We will also learn from the ways that millions of people in the software world have found ways to share complex information.

Forum members will learn most from each other by interacting with real-world projects.

In Matera, for example, members met with the team behind the AgorAgri – a community garden project to transform one of the city’s underused green spaces.

An important lesson emerged: a community garden is as much about growing a community as it is about growing plants – and that takes time.

The project’s rst two years, we concluded, were probably a small proportion of the time that would be needed, long-term. (A conversation is needed about ‘accelerationism’ in mainstream design.

The celebration of ever-faster launch-and-learn approaches is at odds with the time needed to foster trust in a community).

Among other practical suggestions to the AgorAgri team: nd out if any schools in Matera might use the garden as a living classroom.

The European Federation of City Farms is a good source of advice.

The Forum resolved to share knowledge about promising event formats as they are discovered.

The success of the Mammamiaaa dinner instructions was an encouraging benchmark.

Among other formats discussed in Matera: the contadinners organised by VaZapp in Italy; Ireland’s Learning Landscape Symposium; Disco Soupe in France; the Art of Invitation in England; Doors of Perception xskools; and Holis summer schools.

Trans-local and Place2Place meeting formats will take priority over the intensive air travel associated with global conferences.

Formats being considered include learning journeys, pilgrimages, and modern interpretations of the transhumance.

In European Union networks, so-called cross visits are in favour; someone suggested that we need an Erasmus exchange programme for food and agriculture.