An Economy of Place Part 14: Food Systems 2
By: Jenny Andersson
Tags: Food Systems, Service Design, Systems Thinking, Social Enterprise, Regenerative Economy

An Economy of Place Part 14: Food Systems 2

Situated between the south coast of England, close to the French coastline lies Jersey — the largest of the Channel Islands, a self-governing dependency that is part of the United Kingdom but still uniquely independent. It is well known for its beaches, hiking, the German occupation during WW2 but probably most famous as a tax haven to which Britain’s wealthy can successfully go to avoid taxation. A traditional, private and tight-knit community of approximately 108,000 with a GDP of $6billion, the island has more recently played host to the experiment of an incredibly bright and compassionate systems thinker who set out to find a way to change the fortunes of a marginalised group in Jersey’s food system.

Set up in October 2018, SCOOP — the Sustainable Cooperative, is the brainchild of India Hamilton and Kaspar Wimberley. Their goal was to create a sustainable food supply system, in the shadow of the existing traditional food system, by leveraging the values of the stakeholders within the system and designing a response that maximised positive impact on the whole system.

Launched as a consumer cooperative, today SCOOP has nearly 350 fee paying members, sells more than 700 unpackaged products, turns over just over £750k per annum and employees 7 people on a living wage. Close to 3 years later, SCOOP’s voyagehas been an evolutionary learning journey which has combined a number of different approaches. India’s inspiration’s include service design specialists Prof. Francesco Mazzarella and Dr Laura Santamaria as well as leading thinkers in the regenerative development movement such as Daniel Christian Wahl.

Before she returned to her family home on the island, India had already gleaned a lot of experience developing cooperative interventions to build food community in Hyderabad, India. There she sought a way to experiment with an approach that circumvented the strong dominating food system narratives that nutritional food access depends on what you can afford. Instead she looked at the idea that people assign very different values to food and will spend very different amounts on food nutrition as a basis for systemic innovation. Using the emerging trend for healthy juicing in the more affluent middle classes, she found that creating high quality, high value juices from waste in the fruit farming system such as leaves, stems, rind — all of which contain high nutrient value and taste — you could keep the whole fruit to sell at next to nothing to poorer families to improve their nutritional intake. An experiment that was to prove foundational in SCOOP.

Back to Jersey. The very different pathways into SCOOP for India and Kaspar have also contributed to its success. India’s systemic understanding developed both academically and in the field, added to Kaspar’s local cultural insights, created a combined zone of genius that found the right recipe for change (pardon the pun) at SCOOP. “If you consider that economic, systemic and structural challenges are manifestations of culture, you need to deeply understand culture to design a systemic change project,” explains India. “The arts can act as a catalyst for social movements, culture shifts and emancipatory processes so we wanted from the outset to include creativity and art as well as the economics of social justice, in our project. The capacity to listen deeply and with humility and curiosity to understanding our communities — other people’s deep interests, skills and personal journeys alongside trying to understand why things are the way they are — has been critical to our work.”

The Morning Boat: art installation project incollaboration with Future Farmers. Photo: Monica Levdahl

Whilst Kaspar set about testing the boundaries for cultural change in the community through at art led project The Morning Boat, India carried out a stakeholder inquiry to look for systemic opportunities and barriers to change based on a service design approach. Both service design and regenerative development seek to provide a process for working successfully with complexity. One is problem oriented, the other potential focused but both are systemic.

To create a sustainable food supply system which included both production and consumption, the team wanted to focus on ecologically-focused farming which in Jersey meant organic. At the time of beginning the research, despite the growing popularity of organic food across Europe, organic farming had dropped in Jersey by 80% by 2014. The organic farmers weren’t able to create a supply model that suited the increasing dominance of supermarket chains that were popping up as the main source of food supply on the island. There were only 6 organic farmers who used just 50% of their land. Help for them from the local government has filtered away, and labelled them as uncommercial and bad at marketing their produce to the supermarket system. They were isolated from the main food system and in a precarious position in terms of livelihood, cultural heritage, social equality and their efforts to be good stewards of the land.

Holding community talks about the future of food

India’s inquiry took in policy, social, environment, and business contexts looking for insights from four main questions:-

what is your current practice?

what has worked, what has not?

how do you project yourself into the future?

what are the challenges and barriers you see?

This kind of approach is reflected in many emergent processes that are increasingly popular in change fields. Otto Scharmer’s Theory U includes an ‘exploratory’ phase looking at the field gathering knowledge and insight from the system. Regenerative Development looks at The Story of Place which covers biological, cultural, ecological patterns throughout history to inform what the next evolution of people and place might be. No matter the process used, the quality and character of the practitioner to build empathetic relationships and activate a deep sense of caring about the community the project serves, is always key to success.

The research painted a complex picture of barriers and opportunities.

After four months of exhaustive investigation, the SCOOP team not only had a clear, holistic view of the system and how it operated on Jersey, they had also started the slow process of building friends and trust in their work. The main questions to work on emerged as:

clear evidence of marginalisation of the organic community ; how to find a way to bring them into the system successfully

; how to find a way to bring them into the system successfully how do we differentiate between local markets that will build local capacity and decisions that drive the race to the bottom?

between and decisions that drive the how do we define principles for ways of working and at the same time prevent divisiveness

and at the same time how do we overcome historical inbuilt cultural trauma that is a legacy of previous bad decisions

that is a legacy of previous bad decisions the structure in Jersey supports importing; what new infrastructure do we need?

do we need? what simple policy, education and investment options do we need?

do we need? how can we shift technical lock-ins?

Since its birth in 2018 SCOOP as always taken a multi-faceted approach to change with key pillars of its work being disrupting thinking through art and cultural initiatives, looking for systemic acupuncture points where change could have the most impact, and increasing the opportunities for marginalised changemakers in food and agriclture. In regenerative development we often use frameworks to help us in our work. Here is SCOOP’s work mapped against a tetrad.

A Tetrad: a useful framework for managing activities developed by J G Bennett

GROUND: A linear food system dependent on imports and supermarkets; gradual disintegration of local organic agriculture; marginalised few organic farmers with no routes to market; cultural entropy for change.

GOAL: Build a food cooperative with a successful economic model to demonstrate that alternative approaches can be commercial, disproving one of the foundational belief against change.

INSTRUMENTS:

- Disrupt the cultural entropy through art-inspired projects and connective conversation

- Respond to the developing environment with interventions that build knowledge about different approaches to food and allow a physical experience of that difference

- Build developmental capacity in the team

DIRECTION

- Consistently challenge marginalisation and lack of diversity/biodiversity in the system

- Always seek actions that demonstrate the positive potential of systemic change

- Non-confrontational proof that alternative systems deliver sustainable inclusion

SCOOP could be said to have 4 core pillars that have contributed to its success to date.

1) An economic model that works

The SCOOP system is designed on structural barriers, systemic problems to resolve in order to give a level playing field for a particular type of farmer — a marginalised small organic producer. The SCOOP economic model is a consumer cooperative with a quorum for the board, a very collective approach to decision-making, and a strong system of trust and commitment.