The following was sent out to the list serve of Slow Food Columbus. This is a big deal for Columbus. I hope that this really comes together and brings a lot of people to the table to talk about and take action in creating food systems that work towards bringing quality food to everyone’s table.
Dear member of the Central Ohio food community,
Thanks for expressing an interest in a food summit later this summer. While we had tentatively scheduled the event for July 2, a variety of considerations, including the availability of some of the groups that we hope to see there, the time-consuming process of broadening our network of contacts, and the need to ensure some lead time before the meeting, have prompted us to aim instead for a date in the fall. You don’t need to do anything at this point; this note is just to let you know that things are progressing and that we’ll be letting you know more as the date draws near.
In the meantime, we’d like your input regarding how we might make this gathering most useful for you. The meeting was prompted by our observation that many groups in Columbus had common goals but lacked the information about one anothers plans that would enable them to coordinate their activities usefully. The core idea was that, if someone provided a forum in which they could do so, these groups could not only get to know one another better but explore ways of leveraging their comparative advantages to achieve their goals. We also thought that community groups with food-related agendas (ourselves, Wild Goose Creative, Green Drinks, Students for Food Sovereignty) should be involved in the discussion as well, to facilitate communication with the broader community. Our idea, then, was a meeting that was part informational (with everyone discussing their organization’s plans for the coming year) and part unstructured (with time alloted so that people
whose organizations had similar plans could touch base, exchange information, and explore ideas for collaboration).
Since then, we’ve started to realize that mid-Ohio food organizations may be more coordinated than we had realized, but the overall picture that we’ve been getting has not been very clear. Some of the individuals we’ve contacted have been very enthusiastic about exactly the sort of meeting that we’ve just described. Others have cited existing meetings at the state and local level among representatives of many of these groups and pointed out that, to a degree, one aspect or another of the coordination we’d hoped to achieve is ongoing. This news is quite welcome to us, of course, since it means that our original goals are being achieved, but the fact that only some groups are responding in this manner is puzzling.
Above all, we want to be useful to you. So this is your opportunity to tell us how we can best do that. We will set aside, most likely, two or three hours in which representatives of food organizations and food-related community groups will be in one place. Do you see the informational/unstructured format above as being the best way to spend that time, or would it be covering ground that’s already been covered (exhaustively) in other fora? If the latter, what would you most like to talk about or hear about in that time, and why? We’re happy to read your thoughts, and we appreciate your time.
Best regards,
Bethia Woolf
Bear Braumoeller
Slow Food Columbus
