Wayne’s Weekly Hacks: An Eventful Event

The hacks you read here come from my 55 years as a social change leader, my 45 years as a writer of 13 books, thousands of articles and hundreds of leaflets, and my ten years as a career, social media, and strategy coach for the next generation’s champions of good food. 

YOU REALLY HAVE TO EXPERIENCE TODAY’S EVENT

 The Voices of Experience

Here are six lessons I learned from co-organizing a community event on food security.

Here are a few links to other useful event-making thoughts:

Grocery stores are the place to be seen and have a real food experience!!

We’re social animals, so a launch has to be for party animals

This cheese is so good, the whole town joins in a launch designed to attract young people to move here! 

If I had a million dollars: how to do a launch if cost isn’t a question 

“Arrive early and stay late. Before and after the event may be more interesting than the event itself”
Sara Lee, director photography, National Geographic

Variety is the Spice of Co-Sponsored Events

Las Vegas-based Green Our Planet has hosted a giant child-based farmers market since 2013. It now attracts well over 600 students from over 100 local schools. I asked Nancy Gots, special events coordinator for Green our Planet, for a few trade secrets.

Nancy’s Pro Tip is to seek out partners. “No group can pull off a big event by itself,” she says.

Variety is the spice of events,  her experience shows.  Events require a wide range of resources – the goodwill of community supporters, staff time, volunteer time, advertising and promotion, crowd control, transportation, food and beverages, and so on. There has to be a mix and match and bartering –you do this, we’ll do that. One organization with money may lack connections, and one with connections may lack staff.  Partners donate more than any one organization can access on its own, or pay for on its own. 

Having a school district on board with the student-run farmers market project means, among many things, having access to buses to bring in students from across the city. Having the local municipal government onside means the event is held in a spacious facility – the Clark County Government Amphitheater. The local government also ensure police presence to protect the event from a wide range of potential threats. 

More important than resources, Nancy cautions, is a “common mindset.” Every group needs to agree that the project has value for them. In this case, all partners benefit from an increasing  commitment to child nutrition, outdoor education, and engagement with environmental protection.

Nancy’s advice reminded me of the African proverb:

if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. 

Thought Leadership

I’ve long thought that food advocacy deserves to be ranked as a form of “thought leadership.”  I’ve come to believe that it doesn’t get the ranking it deserves because it’s a form of disruptive innovation.

What could it possibly be disrupting, other than the obvious – Big Food?

Listen to Greg Marchildon. In 2001, he was the lead staff for Canada’s royal commission on the future of healthcare in Canada. He is an academic expert in healthcare.

In 2019, Marchildon wrote in the Literary Review of Canada that health is big business. “In fact, health care represents the largest economic sector in all high-income countries…..it has been the fastest-growing part of the US economy since the Second World War…The truth is that every health care expenditure by a federal, provincial or territorial government ends up as someone’s income, so every policy creates winners and losers.”

The health promotion championed by the food movements upsets that lucrative applecart. That makes it a disruptive threat. 

Could this account for food advocates being excluded from influence in health policy?

Breadth Courses

Food connects to everything. That’s why food advocates must read widely. 

If we get around, we get to meet people who  don’t come from a food background. Who knows, we might meet an English teacher, an engineer, a labor organizer, a landscaper. To be good conversationalists, and not to be at a loss as to what our potential partners are talking about, we need some passing understanding of their fields of knowledge.  It’s the equivalent of what training schools call “breadth courses.”

My training for such opportunities includes the New York Review of Books (I’ve been addicted since 1967) , the London Review of Books (addicted since last year), and the Canadian Literary Review (a fan and occasional contributor from the start). 

 Richard Mabey, the famous British nature writer, is a pleasant introduction to anyone’s broadening out.

I read Mabey as someone who “gets” a core idea about food. Belief in the agency and empowerment of people is a core belief of food champions.

Mabey had the same view of Nature – not as a victim, but an actor in its own unfolding. Humans weren’t the first with adaptive capacity! This shines through in Mabey’s reflection on his career as a writer about nature and foraging.

From this perspective, agency and empowerment come naturally to food. So does the overlooked custom  of foraging, which I believe deserves to be restored as a central human tradition of food gathering – put down too easily as “living a hand-to-mouth existence.” This Mabey essay on how plants “think” deserves to be a food classic.

What a nice way to start off a meeting with naturalists!

“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
Charles Darwin 

Request for Action