DeFood Security Summit (late 2023)
We're currently have many conversations and meetings with food producers, agrologists, business folks, government representatives, local First Nations and others about the goal, strategy and tactics needed to achieve 80% food security on Salt Spring in the nearest possible future. As urgent as the problem is, we have to begin by listening, hearing what hasn't worked (even if it should've) and listening to people's suggested solutions to the problem as it stands now, even if those are wild ideas that seem impossible. After all, when the alternative is waking up to empty shelves, impossible ideas start looking a lot more possible.
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These conversations will continue over the next several months, and we feel it would give that process urgency and focus if we’re building up to a “food security summit” in late 2023. This will be our check-in with the larger community, presenting them with hard data about the food security issue in our local community, educating them about the challenges and opportunity of addressing it as a systemic issue, and giving them a good-news report about the broad spectrum of great work already in progress to work toward food security for the island.
Obviously, putting on an event requires time, planning, volunteers and funding, but -- as with having these conversations, and asking people's opinions -- every part of the process doubles as an opportunity for community engagement. This will be a networking event for further relationship-building with an ever-expanding circle of systemically-related organizations and indivduals -- here on Salt Spring that will include members of the Agricultural Alliance, our governing bodies (Islands Trust, the Capital Regional District and the new Local Community Commission), energy/climate change group Transition Salt Spring, alt-transportation-related groups like Island Pathways, housing-related groups like Salt Spring Solutions, organizations advising on water issues like the Watershed Protection Alliance, FIrst Nations organizations like the Stqeeye’ Learning Society, representatives from across the spectrum of traditional and alternative health care, the Chamber of Commerce, local grocery stores and restaurants, land-matching groups like Young Agrarians, organizations promoting greater diversity like Diversity and Inclusion on Salt Spring Island (DAISSI), and more.
We’ll use this event to create new common ground for many who not have previously shared a stage, and shift the food security effort into a higher gear, with much broader support and participation, and ideally public buy-in to our overarching goal -- a secure, sovereign, accessible food supply for all -- which in turn will hold us together through the resolution of systemic issues that have created logjams in many different arenas over the past decades. That process, too, will bring us together, creating real relationships that span the community.
We believe that relationships, not necessity, are what will make this systemic change finally take hold.