Last month, we introduced you to FeedBack Nashville, a new citywide effort to build a better food future for Nashville. A better food future is one wherein all of our neighbors have equitable access to foods that support healthy, thriving livelihoods. It is also a future that nurtures biodiverse, abundant ecosystems and prosperous, local food economies.
Changing our current food system into this better food future is not a simple task. It is a long-term, relational process that requires all of us—from nonprofits and corporations, to public offices and individuals—to share our experiences and perspectives with one another and work together to identify and co-create many different transformational actions.
We often think that the most transformational of these actions happens at the governmental level when policies change. The founding organizations of FeedBack Nashville, including The Nashville Food Project, also believe that meaningful action happens at the grassroots, community, and individual levels, but that these actions are often overlooked. Because of that belief, FeedBack Nashville uses a community-based approach to bring diverse communities and community members together to create shared visions for Nashville’s food future and identify various opportunities to turn that vision into reality.
The FeedBack Nashville Steering Committee.
This effort to bring our community together in pursuit of a better food future is led by the FeedBack Nashville Steering Committee, a group of 16 individuals who have relationships with many of Nashville’s communities that are most affected by the shortcomings of our current food system. The steering committee was formed in July 2023 through a public application process and overseen by the Metro Human Relations Commission Executive Committee. Through the application, community members were invited to describe how their relationships with Nashville’s communities inform their understanding of local challenges like hunger and struggling small-scale farmers. The MHRC decided to accept everyone who applied, leading to the creation of a committee that is ripe with diversity, personal and professional experience, and community knowledge.
Steering Committee members gather at the kick-off retreat in September to participate in a hands-on systems change activity to experience how our actions and decisions impact other people’s actions and experiences.
The committee convened for the first time at a 1.5-day team-building retreat at Shelby Bottoms Nature Center in September. The retreat was facilitated by Forum for the Future, an international sustainability organization that excels in helping communities and organizations work together to create better food futures. At the retreat, steering committee members learned about systems change approaches to alleviating hunger, developed principles and values for working together and with community members, and created a charter to guide their actions.
Steering committee members work together at the kick-off retreat to share their understandings of food challenges in Nashville.
Committee members learn from one another and develop values and principles to guide their work together.
With this foundation established, the committee is now meeting monthly to develop FeedBack Nashville’s community engagement strategy. This strategy, which will be implemented beginning in January 2024, will include events—from potlucks and community conversations to one-on-one interviews—that bring community members together to envision Nashville’s better food future and the opportunities that exist to help us get there.
By centering community members as the leaders of the steering committee and then, centering Nashville’s communities at the forefront of the project’s community engagement strategy, FeedBack Nashville is laying the building blocks for a different way of solving some of our most complex, pressing challenges: a way that is grounded in relationship-building, collaboration, community wisdom, and the pursuit of lasting, meaningful change.
To learn more about FeedBack Nashville, we invite you to join us at our public launch event on December 5, 2023 at 10am. RSVP and more information here.