Community Engagement. A leverage point for sustainability. A food system case study.

In 2022 SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation) established a Global Collaboratory team to use systems thinking methods within a complex problematic situation. The goal has been to provide insights for organisational leaders, and method practitioners, about how and why to approach complex situations in different ways and make change happen (while studying practices) that was (have been) successful, sustained, and minimised undesirable side effects. From a range of possible subjects, the team chose to explore ‘How to Transit to a Circular Economy’, built an initial model, and then focussed on the ‘food system’ as a specific, identifiable scenario within the circular economy; hence food production, distribution, sale, consumption, recycling, and waste, as well as resources used by that food system.
As we began to share our modelling and engaged with stakeholders from beyond corporate agro-business, we discovered a variety of intentional communities; small organisations and collective groups, such as Kindling Trust or the MUD Group, with a defined ecological ethos, most of whom have a very strong commitment to communitarianism, localism, health, and wellbeing. Their goals, aspirations, and activities feel very different to businesses in the food system, but they seem irrevocably coupled to human systems for societal governance, land tenure, and funding, with a few notable exceptions. The team will hold a workshop about community engagement in the food system, to explore sustainability, food security, community collaboration, and consciousness, hence a dialogue to share what to do, how to do it, as well as how to accommodate diverse beneficiaries and perspectives. During the workshop, we will share complementary systemic approaches to enable intentional communities to achieve more integrated decision-making and robust collaboration among themselves. More specifically, we zoom in on how value streams can be defined, made viable, and scaled up.