Networks
A Network Approach to Local Food Systems: Vermont Farm to Plate
Vermont is building on the growing movement for local food systems and making this a major economic development and job driver. To accomplish this, a 10-year Farm to Plate Strategic Plan, based on a comprehensive view of the local food system, was developed with input of 1,200 people. The plan and its goals have broad support and commitment of the Governor and state agency leaders and many organizations across the state involved in and supporting local agriculture.
The VT Sustainable Jobs Fund (VSJF,) who facilitated the plan's development, recognized that 
achieving the goals of the plan, i.e., creating change in a system as complex and inter-dependent as a food system, was bigger than any one organization. It calls for a network approach, creating a new type of coordinating structure that can weave together the many organizations working toward these goals for greater impact. The Network's goal is to enable coordinated collaboration among organizations across Vermont to achieve the plan’s 33 goals and to enhance the participating organizations’ ability to meet their goals.
New Directions Collaborative and Curtis Ogden of Interaction Institute for Social Change have been working with VSJF to design the governance structure for a Farm to Plate Network. We helped facilitate the launch of the network in early October, when 150 leaders from all parts of Vermont's food system gathered for two days to learn about networks, explore how the new network will be organized, and then they rolled up their sleeves and get to work on joint action on strategies in 2012.
Conditions to Catalyze a Network
My obsession of late is foraging wild mushrooms…something about the weather conditions in late summer have made this a spectacular year for mushrooms here in southern New Hampshire. The woods are full of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes. I only know one edible species – black trumpets. Every time I go for a walk in the wo
ods near my house I carefully scan the ground looking for where these mushrooms have sprouted. I now have regular spots where I have found them before and return to find them again, plus it is a thrill to discover new places. The thrill of finding them is surpassed by the thrill of eating them…fried in butter, mixed into scrambled eggs, or as the base for a soup stock for wild mushroom risotto.
All this time out looking for mushrooms has me musing about the conditions that come together for a mushroom to sprout. I can check a place many times through the year and only when there is the right combination of rain, warm weather, nutrients, and who knows what else, will the mushrooms suddenly appear. This can be a metaphor for how to design and facilitate networks – with the right conditions, great results can emerge from collaboration, where together people can achieve way more than they could alone. Though without the right conditions, the same group of people can become mired in debate, details, group think, or miss connections and possibilities that are there but are never realized.
Collective Impact - An Idea Whose Time Has Come
In the Midwest, a group of foundations and non-profits decided to try an experiment – instead of individual foundations placing grants with individual non-profits, they came together to create a coordinated network to pursue the ambitious long-term goal of reducing regional global warming emissions 80 percent (from 2005 levels) by 2050. The Garfield Foundation, on
e of the initiators of the experiment, recognized that the existing work on these issues was fragmented and not achieving the scale of impact needed. The RE-AMP network has now grown to include 125 nonprofits and funders across eight states. A recent case study by The Monitor Institute reported that over the last seven years, their collective work has helped pass energy-efficiency policies in six states, blocked development of 28 new coal plants, and helped influence several states to increase investments in energy efficiency.
Five Tips for Care and Feeding of Networks
In a recent strategy project with a cross-sector network working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we explored what it takes to coordinate collective action and to capture the full potential of the interconnections within the network. Facilitating goal-oriented teams is fairly straightforward; however, even more value can be created for each participant and the network as a whole if the facilitator adopts a network mindset. This calls for a distinct role/orientation as a network weaver. Bill Traynor, of Lawrence Community Works, defines weaving as:
the intentional practice of helping people to build – and connect to – more relationships of trust and value, mostly by virtue of being genuinely interesting in building and connecting oneself to more relationships of trust and value.
A network weaver listens to network members and identifies how the many “threads” in the network can be woven to support each other, achieve larger goals, and enable members to do more together than any could alone. Convening a network requires the right enticements and opportunities to enable the relationships of trust and value to be discovered and cultivated.
Here are five tips for weaving a network:
The Power of Potlucks: Place-Based Networks
One of the most inspiring speeches we heard at the Slow Money National Gathering was from Tom Stearns, President of High Mowing Organic Seeds. His company is based in Hardwick, a small town in northern Vermont, which was featured in The New York Times article entitled “Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town”. Remarkably, over the last three years, the local area has added 150 new jobs to an existing 500 jobs, spread across many small companies, all associated with the local food economy.
One of the key ways this came about was through strong locally-based business networks. Tom described how he and about a doze
n friends/colleagues who owned farms and farm-based businesses began having regular gatherings. Each month they met at a different business where they shared a potluck dinner, a tour of the operation, and then the host presented a topic for discussion. This was a ‘think tank’ of experienced business people who all are running businesses within two to three miles of each other. They recently had their 50th meeting and he estimated that this group, which has now grown to about 40 people, has spent over 300 hours together sharing challenges, offering advice, learning about each others’ businesses, finding partnerships, and even loaning each other money in hard times.
