Agriculture and Human Values 19: 99–106, 2002.
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Creating space for sustainable food systems: Lessons from the field
Gail Feenstra
UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program, University of California, Davis, California, USA
Accepted in revised form November 4, 2001
Abstract. In response to growing trends in the current food system toward global integration, economic consolidation, and environmental degradation, communities have initiated alternative, more sustainable food and
agricultural systems. Lessons may now be learned about the development and maintenance of local, sustainable food systems projects – those that attempt to integrate the environmental, economic, and social health of
their food systems in particular places. Four kinds of space need to be created and protected – social space,
political space, intellectual space, and economic space. Three important themes emerge from these community
spaces: public participation, new partnerships, and a commitment to social, economic, and environmental justice
principles.
Key words: Community food security, Democratic participation, Food policy, Local food systems, Public
scholarship, Sustainable agriculture, Sustainable food systems
Gail Feenstra is the food systems analyst at the University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and
Education Program (SAREP). She coordinates SAREP’s Community Development and Public Policy grants
program and does outreach and education to academic and community-based groups to build their capacity and
leadership skills in building sustainable community food systems.
Introduction
Over the last several decades, researchers, and practitioners associated with the Agriculture, Food, and
Human Values Society and others have articulated the
complex nature of the food system – its local and
global dimensions, the opportunities and challenges
of democratic participation, the economic and community development possibilities, the policy dimensions, the nutrition and community food security
aspects, and, of course, the enjoyment that comes
from sharing locally grown, sustainably produced,
and lovingly and tastefully prepared food. This article will integrate these dimensions into a practical
understanding of what it takes to create and sustain
successful, sustainable food systems. This perspective
comes from observing demonstrations of community
food systems supported by the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SAREP)
throughout California and from working with community members to try to understand how these systems function. It includes working with practitioners
on the applied solutions to food system problems,
the opportunities for change, and the implementation
strategies communities are experimenting with. So,
first, this article will share insights from the experi-
ences of food systems practitioners we have worked
with for the past decade.
Second, sustainable food systems research and
practice has already benefited from the many contributions and theoretical analyses from the fields of
nutrition, sociology, philosophy, community development, education, economics, and the agricultural
sciences. My hope is that we will continue to find ways
of integrating the theoretical work with the applied and
the pragmatic. This article will suggest some additional possibilities for integration that have surfaced
from some of our recent work at SAREP.
And finally, in order to talk about these first two
– insights and integration – a third thing is needed –
common language. It is essential that food systems
researchers and practioners attempt to use a common,
understandable language in which to talk about food
systems work – between academics of different disciplines and between researchers, practitioners, and
community residents. In this article, I will attempt to
use simple, jargon-free language in sharing the ideas
and lessons from our compatriots in the field.
Now, I will explore the applied side of sustainable
community food systems. It is the gritty, unpredictable, in some ways frustrating, but ultimately, exciting
and entirely satisfying dimension of our work. The
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article will not provide a thorough analysis of the current food system as a rationale for these food systems
projects. Suffice it to say that the dominant food and
agricultural system in which we all live, work, and eat,
produces the bulk of our food and fiber in an incredibly
efficient manner by at least one criterion of efficiency.
It is highly energy and capital-intensive, globally integrated, and increasingly economically consolidated.
Unfortunately, it has also resulted in environmental
degradation and economic disaster for scores of small
family farmers, community processors, and other local
businesses tied to food and fiber production, and
community residents who do not have access to an
adequate, healthful food supply. And, it has led to
the disintegration of the social and spiritual fabric –
critical connections – that are part of a community’s
food system. People have become disconnected from
the sources of their sustenance – the land, the people
who grow and harvest their food and fiber, and from
the taste and quality of the food itself. They have
become passive recipients in a rather homogenous
system of nutrient distribution in which real food is
almost considered a luxury – for upper and middleclass eaters. For these and other reasons, the longterm sustainability of the current food system is in
question.
I will start then with the assumption that many
of these characteristics have registered as concerns
and have motivated communities throughout North
America and other parts of the globe, to consider alternative, more sustainable food and fiber systems. These
alternative systems may be characterized as more
environmentally sound, more economically viable for
a larger percentage of community members, and more
socially, culturally, and spiritually healthful. They tend
to be more decentralized, and invite the democratic
participation of community residents in their food
systems. They encourage more direct and authentic
connections between all parties in the food system,
particularly between farmers and those who enjoy
the fruits of their labor – consumers or eaters. They
attempt to recognize, respect, and more adequately
compensate the laborers we often take for granted –
farmworkers, food service workers, and laborers in
food processing facilities, for example. And they tend
to be place-based, drawing on the unique attributes of
a particular bioregion and its population to define and
support themselves.
These sustainable community food systems are also
few in number, unevenly distributed, often small – generally involving less than the majority of a community;
they are precarious and many fail to sustain themselves
over time. If we are looking to these community food
systems initiatives as solutions to the current unsustainable state of affairs in the dominant food system,
one might wonder whether we can really depend on
them. Are they really making a difference? The answer
from my perspective is . . . yes, although perhaps not in
the ways we might have expected.
I will begin at the point at which alternative, sustainable food system activities are already in existence.
Specifically, I will discuss what we are learning about
the development and maintenance of local, sustainable
food systems projects – those that attempt to integrate
the environmental, economic, and social health of their
food systems in particular places. What have these
initiatives actually been able to accomplish? What
elements account for their successes or lack thereof?
Why do some flourish and others wither? What allows
some to build their capacities over time and others to
stagnate? How do these initiatives catalyze active citizenship and sustain it over time? What are, or could be,
the roles of researchers, practitioners, and community
organizers in this ebb and flow of food system activity?
How might we better integrate researchers’ and practitioners’ needs and activities? Although I do not have
all the answers to these questions, I do have some
insights about what it takes for sustainable community
food systems to sustain themselves and the challenges
and opportunities facing those of us in universities who
seek to work with them.
Defining a sustainable community food system
For the last decade or so, we at SAREP, have funded,
supported and provided guidance to sustainable community food systems projects throughout California
with a competitive grants program, and elsewhere
through staff research, technical assistance, and outreach (see www.sarep.ucdavis.edu). These are the concrete projects that are attempting to respond to changes
in the global economy and food system in unconventional ways, for the most part. SAREP’s request for
proposals defines a community food system as: “A
collaborative effort to build more locally based, selfreliant food economies – one in which sustainable food
production, processing, distribution and consumption
is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental
and social health of a particular place.” Its goals
include:
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•
•
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improved access by all community members to
an adequate, nutritious diet;
a stable base of family farms that use more
sustainable production practices;
marketing and processing practices that create
more direct links between farmers and consumers;
food and agriculture-related businesses that
create jobs and recirculate financial capital;
C REATING SPACE FOR SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS : L ESSONS FROM THE FIELD
•
•
improved working and living conditions for farm
and other food system labor, and
food and agriculture policies that promote local
food production, processing, and consumption.
In the shorter term, our work at SAREP continues
to revolve around creating more choices or alternatives
for communities to engage in these issues. We believe
that part of the solution involves citizens in particular
places putting their creative energies together to come
up with their own solutions.
And what kinds of solutions have they been? They
are, as Tom Lyson (1999) says, “civic agriculture”
at its best – cooperative agricultural marketing programs that educate consumers about eating regionally
and seasonally while building the supply of locally
produced and processed foods; school districts that
purchase foods from local farms using sustainable
farming practices and teach children about eating
fresh, local foods, composting, and recycling through
school meals and gardening; entrepreneurial community gardens or CSAs (community supported agriculture projects) that teach youth about growing and
marketing foods to low-income communities; a CSA
community farm run by community members and sustainable ag students at a local university; and local food
policy councils that link community food security with
local, sustainable farming systems.
An opportunity to reflect: community food systems
and public scholarship
For the first five to seven years or so at SAREP, we happily funded projects and promoted their benefits and
successes, small as they sometimes were. We launched
many and let them go, keeping in touch loosely; in a
few cases, more regularly. But we never had an opportunity to really reflect on or document what impacts
they were having (or not) until about a year ago. At
that time, SAREP was invited, along with my colleague David Campbell,1 community studies extension
specialist and director of the California Communities
Program at UC Davis, to be part of a national team
of researchers led by Scott Peters at Cornell University, to look at the role of “public scholarship” at
land grant institutions, specifically in the arena of food
systems research and practice. We were asked, along
with seven other groups, to prepare a case study of
a university–community partnership that demonstrated
public scholarship at work. The entire group is still in
the process of defining “public scholarship” and all
its implications, but for now I’ll use one definition
that came out of our meeting last summer: “Public
scholarship is intellectual activity that organizes and/or
supports groups of active citizens as they reflect on
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experience and reason collectively.” We decided to use
this invitation from Scott as an opportunity to explore
the whole suite of community food systems projects
SAREP had funded and worked with over the last
decade. Focusing on these community food systems
initiatives allows us to see broader themes or patterns
and develop insights based on a number of projects.
At the same time, because these initiatives have been
carried out under a single program rubric that has been
fairly stable over the last decade, we had rich longitudinal data to ground our reflections and insights.
Our focus for the California case study was to identify
the manner and extent to which public scholarship has
been integrated in the design, development and transformation of these food systems initiatives and the
ways they have impacted public scholars both within
and outside of the university.
To gather information for our case study, we
reviewed SAREP’s program documents over the last
10 years. In the fall of 2000, we conducted 22 openended interviews (7 in person, 15 by phone) with food
system practitioners who received SAREP grants, with
SAREP staff, and with SAREP’s program and technical advisory committee members. And finally, we
held a community food systems forum in November
2000, which gathered a small group of some of our
best food systems project leaders to reflect on outcomes, learnings, the nature of university–community
partnerships and the role of community food systems as a vehicle for engaging “public scholarship.”2
The entire case study lays out a bigger picture from
the perspective of the land grant university than will
be discussed in this article. I will be focusing more
specifically on the community food systems projects
themselves – voices from the field – so to speak, and
how we are making sense of their stories.
Creating and protecting space
While all of these projects were experimental in nature
and most are still in their formative stages, one key
theme we heard again and again was that community
leaders had to “create space” for the germination of
these admittedly risky projects in their communities,
and protect space for their continuation. What kind of
space are they speaking about? Let me briefly describe
four kinds of space, how it was created and protected,
and then give you examples of what I mean.
Social space
From their inception, the successful food systems projects encouraged communities to create new social
spaces. This might have included actual physical
places, like new farmers’ markets or community gar-
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dens, where rich social interactions took place. More
often, it meant the multiple opportunities these projects
created for diverse people in communities to come
together to talk, listen to each other’s concerns and
views, plan together, problem-solve, question, argue
and come to agreement, compromise, learn another’s
language and how to speak so someone else can hear
you, and to get to know and trust one another in the
context of a common purpose or vision. This is where
“social capital”3 is created. Here is also where democratic theory and practice come together, as Harry Boyt
and Nancy Kari have described in Building America:
The Democratic Promise of Public Work (1996). It is
where regular citizens and residents have the opportunity to participate in their food systems in new ways.
This happens in the context of food policy councils such as the Marin Food Policy Council, or the
Berkeley Food Policy Council; in grassroots organizations devoted to improving community food security
such as the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners
or the Pomona Inland Valley Council of Churches; in
Slow Food Movement convivia; in farmer-community
breakfast meetings in the heart of California’s Central
Valley; in farm-to-school committees in Davis, Winters, and Santa Monica, California, in Ithaca, New
York, in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Hartford, Connecticut. However, building relationships of trust in
a participatory food system is not always easy; in
fact, sometimes it can be frustrating. I am beginning
to learn to expect some friction in the development
of the social spaces. If there is not any, I am suspicious. It seems to be necessary for solid social
relationships to be established in community food
systems projects. On the other hand, when a group
learns to know itself, a lot of possibilities emerge.
For example, one of the first projects SAREP funded
in this area was the Ventura County Food Safety
Group. This diverse group of community leaders came
together with the help of a UC Cooperative Extension specialist and county director in the aftermath of
the Natural Resources Defense Council’s report about
apple growers’ use of Alar, a growth regulator that
the EPA had declared carcinogenic. There was a lot of
tension among the agricultural community, consumer
advocates, and regulators. Passions ran high. It was
not hard to draw the group together, but it did take,
according to one participant, at least five or six meetings before people could stop yelling and begin to
listen to one another. Then, they began to take “field
trips” to each others’ place of work so each participant could describe their perspective more thoroughly.
By the end of the process, the group had established
a constructive dialogue. It was this experience that
later led some of the leaders to seed a new group
representing diverse interests, called the Ag Futures
Alliance, that is developing a shared vision of how to
sustain agriculture in the county.
Social spaces are also for celebrating, for enjoying
each other’s company, for learning how to support
one another. These gatherings include harvest fairs
(the Garlic, Mandarin, or Eggplant festivals), CSAcommunity celebrations on farms, farmers’ markets,
school garden day celebrations, and local food banquets like the ones regularly held in Iowa. I think
of the social spaces as filling the interstices – the
nooks and crannies of a community food system. They
are the glue that allows the new community food
system to hang together or not. The stronger the glue,
the more solidly rooted the community food system.
Celebrations help to grow roots.
Lesson #1 on creating and sustaining social
spaces: Take it seriously. Create multiple opportunities for residents to come together and talk about
food system concerns, visions, and activities. Learn to
speak a common language. Do not forget to celebrate.
Allow time to grow roots.
Political space
Closely related to social space is political space. Every
community food systems project we talked with spoke
of their involvement in policymaking at some level –
from the school district or local institution of higher
education, to city, county, or state government. This
kind of space almost needs to be carved. Each project
leader managed to carve out his or her own political spaces to do things like craft a local school food
policy, add a local food component to the city’s or
county’s General Plan, or put ballot measures on a
local ballot to preserve open space and farmland. One
project we funded in northern California did an analysis of land use patterns, focusing on vineyards, and
got very involved in the policy process, helping residents evaluate current land use policy and vineyard
development and understand how they might want to
change policies to preserve oak woodland habitats.
Carving political spaces often involves community
organizing. All of the project leaders we spoke
with were involved in organizing local residents
for the purpose of improving their food system in
some way. The Rural Development Center educated
and organized farmworkers to grow organic produce
and sell it to low-income neighborhoods in Salinas;
the Pomona Inland Valley Council of Churches
organized farmers to set up a farmers’ market in
Pomona; the Berkeley Youth Alternatives Garden
Patch Project organized community volunteers to start
a community garden and later a CSA, employing
local youth (see www.berkeleyyouthalternatives.org;
www.pedalexpress.com/BYA); the Park Village CSA
C REATING SPACE FOR SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS : L ESSONS FROM THE FIELD
Project organized low-income residents of a Cambodian housing development to farm local land and sell
their produce through a CSA and farmstand. Eventually, some of these projects were able to leverage these
organized groups to push for policy changes at local or
regional levels.
One important element of creating political spaces
and policies is that it can help food system pilot projects or models institutionalize their efforts within a
community. This stabilizes the activities and allows
them to mature in place. Probably the best example
of this for me is the Berkeley Food System Project – a
project to introduce fresh, locally grown, organic foods
into the school meals program, to integrate a garden
in every school with food systems-oriented curricula,
and to start a citywide food policy council to address
community food security (see www.berkeleyfood.org).
Within the last three years, this project has accomplished many of its goals, due in no small part
to insightful project leaders. From the outset, they
began thinking about how to institutionalize their
work through policies. They have created an MOU
(memorandum of understanding) with the city’s Health
Department to help staff the new food policy council;
written a districtwide school food policy and a citywide food policy, and passed a ballot measure in the
last general election allocating money to purchase new
equipment for many of the school district’s kitchens. It
helps that one of the project leaders is a former state
representative. In any event, much of the work of this
project will continue with or without these particular
people or the level of funding they currently enjoy
because of the policies that have institutionalized their
efforts.
So what is it that convinces policymakers? We
learned from our project leaders and policymakers
we interviewed that they like stories. Data are nice;
stories are better. The importance of a compelling narrative cannot be underestimated. It is what convinced
the County Board of Supervisors in Placer County
to award a small group of citizens close to $100,000
for their novel local agricultural marketing program
(PlacerGROWN). It is what convinced Rodney Taylor,
head of Santa Monica/Malibu school food service to
try a farmer’s market salad bar in his lunch program. It
is what convinced the Arcata City Council to preserve
the Arcata Community Farm as a working urban farm
on city property.
Having said that, I also want to make a case for
collecting solid data that show the impacts of a new
initiative. Decision-makers also need to know how and
when these models can become economically viable
and how they contribute to community health. So, in
the end, both qualitative and quantitative information
is needed.
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Lesson #2 on political spaces: Think about carving
out political spaces from the outset. Community organizing is a critical component of this work if you
believe in democratic participation in the food system.
Work toward institutionalizing sustainable food systems efforts through local policies. Learn the language
of policymakers. Tell good stories. Measure impacts.
Intellectual space
Intellectual space includes several related elements:
articulating the vision of a sustainable food system
and then conceptualizing a community food system
initiative within the local context. It also involves
reflecting on progress and future plans with local residents. Successful projects all included at least one
person who had a clear vision and could share the “big
picture” with the rest. It helped ground the project
when the inevitable personnel, economic, policy, or
other changes occurred.
In SAREP’s case, our staff helped create the intellectual space that allowed community food system
partnerships to find a voice to describe their activities.
We helped conceptualize the elements of a community
food system and worked with these projects as they
sought to build concrete expressions of these ideas. We
also linked them to published work and to a larger network of other projects across the state, and in fact, the
country, which involved similar activities. In 1996, we
hosted a community food systems conference to showcase the efforts of some of our projects, to strengthen
the network, and to build the intellectual rationale for
food systems work. All of this was important to these
initiatives and allowed us and them to expand our
efforts.
Although this might all sound great, it was not
easy – for us or for the community food systems projects we worked with. Creating intellectual space is
risky. Within a land grant institution that is focused
on the technological solutions to food and agricultural
issues – particularly for the largest players – trying to
support small-scale initiatives that include a decidedly
social component, frankly was not well understood
by SAREP’s Program and Technical Advisory Committees. The projects we wanted to fund were not
traditional research projects with which committee
members were familiar. They represented blends of
social science, community organizing, and pragmatic change. A lot of education and justification
was and continues to be necessary to show the
connections between the biological and social sciences, between food production and food consumption, and between research projects and community
demonstrations. Because of increasing specialization
in disciplines, these connections have been seriously
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weakened. Community food systems projects, however, can provide an occasion, an opportunity to
revitalize and strengthen these interdisciplinary connections.
The other part of intellectual space has to do with
reflection and evaluation. We have tried to ensure
in each of SAREP’s community food systems projects that each project includes a reflective or analytic
component so that community action and communitybased inquiry are integrated. Unfortunately, this does
not always work out as well as it is supposed to. We
are learning about different kinds of evaluation in different circumstances. For example, initially, we tried
to encourage an evaluation of the newly established
PlacerGROWN using quantitative outputs (membership numbers, annual funding levels). These indicators
did not look particularly strong after three years. Later,
however, we learned about the important impact that
the leadership in PlacerGROWN had in the formation
of a countywide agriculture and open space initiative
called Placer Legacy. A narrow focus on particular
evaluative criteria would have kept us from seeing the
longer-term impacts. Evaluation is definitely an area
that needs more attention and resources.
Lesson #3 on intellectual spaces: Despite the difficulties and riskiness, persevere in bringing multiple
disciplines and community perspectives together in
creating intellectual space – the rationale, the vision
for community food systems. Be flexible and creative
in finding opportunities for reflection and evaluation.
Economic space
Most of the projects we worked with included some
connection with the local economy – they attempted to
find ways to recirculate local financial capital within
the region. We saw three or four kinds of CSAs
from “market baskets” in low-income neighborhoods
of L.A., to neighborhood flower CSAs in Berkeley
and Sacramento, to community-wide CSAs in rural
Arcata, California. We also had projects that examined
year-round and extended employment for agricultural
workers who could then eventually afford to live in the
community. And we had a project looking at how community members could share the costs of land tenure
and stewardship.
All of the project leaders we spoke with said that
some outside funding was absolutely necessary to
really allow them to get off the ground. Extra startup or seed funding was critical. SAREP provided
many seed grants for these projects. Other sources
were county boards of supervisors that provided startup funds to PlacerGROWN, the local ag marketing
program in Placer County; city governments like the
one in Los Angeles that provided funds to the Los
Angeles Security and Hunger Partnership (an advisory
body to the city on food policy); or the USDA, which
provided start-up funds for Berkeley’s Food System
Project. Funds can come from national, state, county,
city, or private foundation sources, but without them,
it is hard to get going. Once a project has started
and been in existence for awhile, the next challenge
is keeping it going – the maintenance phase. There
seems to be a vulnerable time between start-up and
stability, between initiation and institutionalization,
in which the project needs particular nurturing. Continued funding is very helpful at this stage of project development; it buys time for new paradigms to
solidify. However, successful projects must also have
project managers who know how to manage funds well
– who are fiscally responsible and creative.
Lesson #4 about economic space. Recirculating
local financial capital is a key element in successful
community food system projects. However, projects
should also be proactive in seeking additional economic resources, which will probably be needed for
some time. Successful projects learned how to leverage
local resources and managed funds creatively, yet
responsibly.
What have these community food systems
initiatives accomplished?
Despite these projects, a very small percentage of
growers or consumers are interested in marketing or
buying or growing local or organic produce. The
sales volume at farmers’ markets is a tiny fraction of
food sales through huge retail chains like Safeway,
Albertson’s, or WalMart. Acres set aside for farmland
protection in conservation easements or trusts are few
by comparison to those being sold for development.
However, I prefer to use analogies from nature – like
icebergs and butterflies – when I think of these community food systems initiatives. From one perspective,
you just see a little bit of the whole, or only the quiet
chrysalis stage of development, and it might appear
that not much is happening. The reality is, however,
that there is a lot of largely invisible development
going on – the formation of new local economic or
social relationships, the understandings of new ways
of seeing the food system, the background politicking
required for the formation of new policies, the training
or mentoring of new civic entrepreneurs, the creation
of new food system infrastructures, and the growing
body of research analyzing and evaluating new alternatives. I think of all of these activities as constituting
an invisible web that underlies the development of
alternative, sustainable food systems. It takes time
to develop this web – two to three years minimum
C REATING SPACE FOR SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS : L ESSONS FROM THE FIELD
– and unless it is supported it grows weaker. As a
grantor, I was originally intent upon seeing tangible,
visible results within a year, if not sooner. In time,
I listened and learned about this invisible web from
project participants. And I saw, over time, that they
were right.
Lesson #5: Be patient (especially if you are a
funder); think of accomplishments or outcomes in different ways and support the invisible dimensions to the
extent that you can.
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What overriding themes emerge from these
community voices and spaces?
Three themes seem to underlie all these spaces. They
are the three “Ps” – public participation, partnerships,
and principles.
Public participation
Public participation is key to all of these community
food systems projects. The public must have genuine
decision-making power. This is even more significant when we realize that project participants frequently represent marginal or disenfranchised groups.
They have included farmworkers, small-scale organic
producers, low-income community residents, and limited resource/ethnic farmers. Community food systems projects offer them real opportunities to develop
leadership from among their ranks. We have seen that,
in particular, with some of the youth-oriented projects.
Young people are learning to grow, harvest, and process food for their communities at the same time as
they learn business and marketing skills, community
outreach, and nutrition/health education skills, and
they learn about the strength inherent in their own
and their community’s unique assets. The fundamental
resource in all of these projects is the people. They are
the best storytellers. They are the local heroes. It is
they who have found their own unique ways to create
the social, economic, intellectual, and political spaces
for these projects to thrive.
Partnerships
Community food systems projects provide a vehicle
for diverse groups to come together for the purpose of
making their food system and their communities more
sustainable. As part of the university, we of course,
encouraged campus faculty and Cooperative Extension to be partners in these projects. They have access
to particular skills and capacities that could support
the development of these struggling projects. Project
leaders identified some areas where such partnerships
are most valuable.
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Access to resources: economic resources, technical resources and organizational skills. In the
best projects, university personnel acted more as
facilitators and less as project leaders. Yet, they
offered valuable support (e.g., access to grants,
technical skills, facilitation skills) on a consistent
basis, to nurture projects along. It is the pragmatic
skills community members need most.
Capacity to help projects evaluate progress
and reflect on their past and future directions.
Although we at SAREP have done this to a limited extent, we can see how creating more spaces
for reflection and sharing would be extremely
valuable. There is no template out there, so every
bit of time spent thinking, reflecting, readjusting,
re-evaluating, is useful.
Framing. University faculty and extension personnel can use their background in social or
agricultural or nutrition sciences to help locate
projects within a broader framework. This is
most useful to community partners (and university partners) when they are part of the discussion
process and can comment on initial ideas and
drafts. This larger framing can help community
participants see themselves and their work as part
of something much larger.
Principles or values
We found that the motivation for community residents,
project leaders, and SAREP staff to be involved in
many of these projects over a long period of time
came from a deep commitment to social, economic,
and environmental justice and health, to democratic
participation, to the importance of local wisdom, local
dreams, community spirit, and often to their own spiritual traditions. We saw that by remembering these
values and by allowing the community to help nurture them, the motivation could be sustained over
time, even when things looked bleak. Susan Ornelas,
one of our project leaders, for instance, was turned
down on several grant proposals and had lost support
temporarily from the institution of higher education
with which she was affiliated. But did that discourage
her? NO. She spent the summer making and selling
homemade burritos from a little cart to raise resources
for the project. Eventually, circumstances did change
and the project was once again on stable ground. I
really admire that brand of persistence and determination, typical of many of these project leaders. I believe
it comes from a sense of hope. Hope in the face of
difficult circumstances. Hope that is seeded and nurtured in companionship. Hope that all of our efforts
together will result in a more sustainable, life-giving
food system for all.
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G AIL F EENSTRA
In closing, I would like to share the words of
Peter Gillingham, who in the afterword to E. F. Schumacher’s book, Good Work, explains the theme and
title of Schumacher’s book, and in so doing, provides
inspiration for our work. “[Good work] is the belief
that our only salvation individually and collectively
lies in taking back the responsibility for finding and
creating our own good work, the place where the spiritual and the temporal, the theoretical and the concrete,
mankind and nature, all converge; and for increasing
our capacities so that we can and will do so.”
Notes
1. See Dr. Campbell’s recent paper, “Conviction seeking
efficacy: Sustainable agriculture and the politics of cooptation,” Agriculture and Human Values 18(4): 353–363,
2001.
2. Many thanks to Dr. Robert Pence, who spent many hours
interviewing project leaders, helped facilitate the forum,
and suggested helpful ways of thinking about and organizing responses. For his account of BIOS and BIFS, two
California-based programs that define an applied Agriculture Partnership model of extensions, see Pence and
Grieshop, 2001.
3. According to Robert Putnam (1993), social capital refers to
“features of social organization, such as networks, norms,
and trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for
mutual benefit.”
References
Boyt, H. and N. Kari (1996). Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Campbell, D. (2001). “Conviction seeking efficacy: sustainable
agriculture and the politics of co-optation.” Agriculture and
Human Values 18(4): 353–363.
Gillingham, P. (1979). “The making of good work.” In E. F.
Schumacher (ed.), Good Work. New York: Harper & Row
Publishers.
Lyson, T. A. (1999). “From production to development: moving
toward a civic agriculture in the United States.” Paper
presented at the annual meetings of the Rural Sociological
Society, August 4–8, 1999, Chicago, Illinois.
Pence, R. A. and J. L. Grieshop (2001). “Mapping the road
for voluntary change: Partnerships in agricultural extension.”
Agriculture and Human Values 18(2): 209–217.
Putnam, R. D. (1993). “The prosperous community. Social
capital and public life.” The American Prospect (13): 35–42.
Address for correspondence: Gail Feenstra, Food Systems Analyst, UC Sustainable Agriculture Research & Ed. Program, One
Shields Ave., University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Phone: +1-530-752-8408; Fax: +1-530-754-8550;
E-mail: gwfeenstra@ucdavis.edu