Author: David Strelneck

This year’s United Nations #InternationalYouthDay (August 12^th, 2021) focuses on youth leadership for transforming food systems.

Nourishⁿ celebrates six initiatives achieving remarkable impact on food systems through youth leadership. Each of these integrate socio-economic challenges or food/cooking competitions into more traditional school garden, meal, or classroom programs. By connecting the youth food experience across socio-economic topics, such as financial sustainability and connection to environment (biodiversity/climate/water) and nutritional impact on a student’s own academic and sports performance, these initiatives are sparking a sense of opportunity and agency that youths carry back into their homes and communities actively, transformationally.

• The Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT)
  
• The Vegetable Academy in Germany and Austria
  
• STAR School in Arizona USA
  
• Native American Community Academy (NACA) in New Mexico USA
  
• Gardens for Health in Rwanda
  
• Nourishing Schools in India

We’d encourage the U.N. and others to aggressively support this pattern and these food system innovators.

These members of our Nourishment Economies Coalition have pioneered social and business enterprises which stimulate the wealth of animal, plant, and microbial biodiversity in the world.

We understand biodiversity as a metabolism for health in people and land. Micro- and macro-biodiversity are engines that convert minerals and chemicals and sights and sounds into the fabric of life, and these enterprisers build on those forces in powerful ways.

Many of them entered the recent Ashoka Act for Biodiversity challenge, and links to their entries and ideas are provided below.

Sustainable Harvest International, Central America: Pioneering technical, financial, and community support tools needed by small farmers during the risky time needed to transition from historically dependent/destructive land management practices back to ecological and economically healthy ones.

Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, United States: Moving the American “community land trust” system of conservation properties and community relationships into the future by fostering a nimble public-plus-private force to monitor and take action on local ecological risks as they emerge.

Burren Programme, Ireland and the European Union: Combining simple financial incentives, locally-based technical assistance, and cultural tradition (“pocket, head, and heart”) to restore historical wildflower and plant diversity (and thus tourism) in livestock farming communities.

BeeOdiversity, Belgium, Europe, and the United States: Using high-end laboratory science and bees as data collectors for public and private partnerships that identify and tackle specific biological and chemical risks to biodiversity in a region.

Convenant Pathways, Navajo Nation in the United States: “Healing the soil, healing the soul” by combining Native and forgotten traditional farming and spiritual practices with modern regenerative methods and enterprises in local communities, for biological, health, economic, and cultural benefit.

Njeremoto Biodiversity Institute, Zimbabwe: Increasing food and nutritional security in ways that also increase biodiversity, through community rehabilitation of degraded rangelands.

Radicle Wellness through Home Health Gardens, United States: A methodical plant-by-plant approach for households that creates home gardens which empower individuals and communities to lead their own everyday health, and which diversify home yards and biodiversity in the process.

Canopy Bridge, Ecuador and global: An online international marketplace for buyers and sellers of ecologically grown products.

URDT, Uganda: An acclaimed girls school system that fosters community enterprisers who understand, envision, and build on local resources including healthy soil, wildlife, and nutrient cycles between people and ecology.

COMACO, Zambia: Recognized globally for combining elephant and forest conservation, local farming and food security, and atmospheric carbon sequestration into a fascinating enterprise model that now partners closely with over 180,000 local farmers.

Conservation Through Public Health, Uganda: Stewarding natural forests and wildlife by creating community partnerships to scientifically monitor relationships between health of people, gorillas, and livestock.

The Nomad Dairy, Ethiopia: Engabling indigenous communities to earn revenue for managing wide landscapes and protect ecology and biodiversity in traditional ways by selling traditional, nutritional camel milk to consumers in cities.

Enterprises like the following examples in our Nourishment Economies Coalition support ecology, reduce pollution, and create economy on the “waste recycling” side of regenerative nutrient-nutrition-nourishment cycles. They circulate nutrients back into productive use by people and biology in land or foods at large scale:

• Food processing industry: Multiform Harvest (USA) crystalizes phosphorus from leftover potato skins at food processing factories, reducing their waste discharge while creating a local source of phosphorus fertilizers. This lowers costs and reduces external fertilizer purchases. http://www.multiformharvest.com/

• Restaurants and animal feed: Bold Nutrition (Nigeria) produces protein-rich feed for fish farms, by growing insect larvae on leftover food wastes from a network of local restaurants, to whom they then sell the fish raised. https://boldnutritiondotco.wordpress.com/

• Urban sanitation and compost: SOIL (Haiti) converts sanitation waste from over 6500 people, and has now produced over 510 tons of agricultural grade compost while providing clean sanitation systems for people. https://www.oursoil.org/

• Household waste to large farms: Garbage to Gardens (USA) collects kitchen waste from over 10000 homes, composts it at a large central facility (in partnership with a farm), and re-sells it for home gardeners, large farms, and production of other value-added products. http://nourishn.com/2018/09/17/garbage-to-garden-a-nourishment-cycle-enterprise/

• Financing composting infrastructure: This article cites over US$21 million in organic composting infrastructure investments in one place, and describes the volume and type produced by several large-scale composting operations: https://www.biocycle.net/2020/01/14/financing-composting-infrastructure-development

Feel free to add additional examples, questions, and information in the comment box below.

Based in Indonesia, the company Javara and its 50,000 farmer-entrepreneurs produce locally and sell on four continents, from Asia to North America. Their products include sustainably grown fruits, nuts, rice, superfoods, oils, condiments and more. Customers include supermarkets, restaurants, hotel chains such as Grand Hyatt, and end consumers through Javara’s own store and cafe in the city of Jakarta. This social and commercial success opened its doors in 2008, with its founder inspired by community values and a desire to help conserve her country’s traditional foods, indigenous wisdom, and biodiversity.

In contrast to many common notions of big agriculture and large-scale food processing, or perceived limits of smallholder and ecological farming, Javara excels through thousands of local partnerships across the country. This is no small feat given Indonesia’s diverse and vast territory, but the business model has proven remarkably successful when aligned around community values. It is designed specifically to work with smallholder farm networks and artisanal food processors. It has been profitable and growing for more than a decade, while upholding 100 percent of production in land-friendly, health-friendly, and culture-friendly ways.

The Roots of JAVARA’s Success

Several critical factors contribute. At the core, many Indonesian farmers practice traditional methods, which in large part means they don’t use chemical fertilizers and pesticides in ways that damage soil health and biodiversity. In fact, Indonesia retained its rich history of organic farming while others were adopting what they perceived as “modern” commercial agricultural practices in the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.  The result is generations of Indonesians whose culture and livelihoods involve working the land. This foundation of organic farming skills, when nurtured with Javara’s technical assistance in regenerative land management practices and identification of traditional ingredients and organizing and marketing, has brought forgotten foods into the mainstream and built commercial markets for their rich flavors and traditions.

Important to Javara’s success is a focus on supporting farmers not just as producers but as creative entrepreneurs. This principle is modeled by Javara’s founder, Ms. Helianti Hilman, a cook and a lawyer who started the entire enterprise in this way with her own mother’s urging. Javara selects and works hand-in-hand with its local farmer-entrepreneurs throughout their production process – from engaging them in the discovery of foods with high market potential, to providing financial assistance, training in technology and marketing, and support for organizing into local collectives.

Javara simultaneously works with and trains local food artisans to identify, create, and produce high quality, great tasting products. These artisans then source their food from the farmer collectives, process it, and sell to Javara for centralized marketing and distribution. In this way, traditional smallholder farmers and local food producers are the essential bio-cultural-economic value-adding source for Javara’s products.

Beyond Products on Shelves: Storytelling

Essential to Javara’s model is storytelling – bringing food products to life for consumers, in Indonesia and Globally. To this end, the food’s packaging tells you its origin in history, how it is grown and produced, its nutritional benefits, culinary ideas, and a dose of indigenous wisdom. When in the city of Jakarta, you can even experience all of this first-hand at the JAVARA cafe and store. While there you can taste the foods, talk to farmers, meet chefs who helped create the food products, take cooking classes, and learn more about the biodiversity, indigenous wisdom and culinary tradition of these products.

Example: Andel Abang Red Rice is popular in the Yogyakarta and Central Java regions of Indonesia. It originated with Admiral Cheng Ho in the 14^th century, is cultivated three times per year, and contains selenium which helps fight free radicals that damage cell membranes in your body, thus helping prevent degenerative illnesses while also lowering blood sugar.

Javara began with one founder who cares immensely about her community, ten farmers, and eight products. It now includes 85 employees, 50,000 local farmers, 3,000 local food artisans, and 600 products sold around the globe. Traditional Indonesian farmers and artisans and Javara’s business managers confront challenges together and prosper with culture, economy, food security, nutrition and biodiversity – and consumers are becoming more connected to their food through taste and stories.

Photo Credits: Javara

This overview was drafted by staff of Nourishⁿ and  Tolani Lake Enterprises, a member of the Nourishment Economies Coalition. 

Native youths in Arizona, USA, are launching a new pop-up café enterprise, where they will sell food they prepare, from crops they grow with regenerative and indigenous-inspired farming practices, to people driving between the remote reservation and the non-Native “border towns” (like Flagstaff, Arizona). This includes plans for pop-up food stands at minor and major roads, at stopping points for travelers, and at special events.

Building on the economic, cultural, scientific and programmatic work of  Tolani Lake Enterprises, and their participation in “nourishment entrepreneurship” exercises organized with Nourishⁿ and social entrepreneurs from around the region and the world, this new enterprise aligns practical action with deeper objectives and social forces. It also builds on recognition already received by the presitigious MIT SOLVE business ideas marketplace. 

The objectives are, with the utmost respect, to simultaneously steward the future while helping provide healing of collective historical trauma in local Native communities. 

The enterprise will do this by fostering a foundation for productive Native youth action that is aligned with three strong indigenous values: (1) taking care of community; (2) stewarding regenerative food-land-water-medicine-wellness cycles; and (3) a modern vision of the traditional core value of youth warriorship for the community, which can now be expressed as entrepreneurship. These values will provide a foundation for safely confronting and resolving historical, political, economic, and educational challenges.

From this foundation, the entrepreneurial pop-up café enterprise will also tackle a broader cultural and economic challenge in the community: learning how to develop a local economy. This is important because the Native community in this region has not previously experienced a well-developed local economy. The new enterprise will demonstrate how to create indigenous and culturally-consistent products and businesses, aiming to inspire and promote local producers in the area. The community has previously experienced local economy based on flea markets, convenience stores, and sometimes a barter and trade system. However, there have been few economic pursuits to build sustainable jobs and services; there is little to no economic infrastructure for local businesses; and a range of historical policies and laws were implemented specifically to prevent local economic development (and thus to keep the Native community dependent on outside resources).

In the words of the young leaders of this initiative, “The new enterprise will help us demonstrate local economic development to ourselves.” 

Importantly, all this will be realized through direct actions and experiences for Native youth:practicing regenerative/agroecological farming, with positive impact on nutrition, food security, water, biodiversity, and climate; collective farming and value-added processing for the community, rather than each farmer trying to sell their individual produce to anonymous markets; promotion and cooking of fresh, local, and Native foods (implying physiologically and psychologically healthier diets for locals as well as the traveling public); connecting local markets for farmed produce with grazed meats, helping reintegrate that divide in Native land and resource management; and more.

Since our  Nourishment Economies Action Summit in 2017, some hurdles that inhibit young peoples’ confidence in launching new enterprises have  become clear to Jake Foreman of the Native American Community Academy and the Native Entrepreneur in Residence Program in New Mexico, USA. These include lack of basic financial skills, frequent exclusion from the American financial system, and a mismatch between that mainstream system and the more community-oriented values of marginalized parts of society (including many Native American communities) which also influence these young peoples’ perceptions and actions.

To help stimulate practical insights and action, we convened this “Huddle” with Jake and two accomplished social entrepreneurs who are pioneering new programs and tools for tackling these hurdles with other communities:

– Lily Lapenna, CEO and Chairperson of MyBnk, stimulating confidence and skills among people ages 5-25 on enterprise skill development, startup of new financial institutions, and financial inclusion rather than exclusion in society.

– Hamse Warfa, founder of BanQu, developing personal ledgers and blockchain technology to create economic and career identities among refugee communities and others traditionally excluded from global economic systems.

Facilitating and sharing insights were Bill Carter, chair of selection panels and Science and Social Entrepreneurship initiatives at Ashoka, and David Strelneck, founder of Nourishⁿ, which support and organizes social entrepreneurs and new communities to help spark regenerative Nourishment Economies in society.

View the 1-hour video (YouTube) or download the transcript (pdf)

 

Some Insights from the Huddle

This lively discussion surfaces intriguing insights and examples, on the following topics and more:

The importance and approaches for people practicing financial literacy from a very young age, not to gain skills per se, but to gain confidence in their own relationship with powerful institutions in society.

The conundrum that mainstream financial and banking services are much more expensive for poor people to access than they are for more affluent people.

How personal, blockchain-based ledgers (such as the BanQu app) can help young people understand and document that their participation in activities and events — including simple jobs and volunteer activities they perform  — hold importance for themselves,  their communities, and also for financial institutions which seek indicators of an individual’s credit-worthiness as demonstrated through past actions. The transparent personal ledgers document and demonstrate these factors.

How similar approaches and technologies might help establish transparent accounting and compensation for the exponential value creation of enterprises which cut across multiple sectors in society. This includes, for example, the combined health, food, farming, and environmental impact of most nourishment-cycle enterprises.

The remarkable success of youth-led learning and co-creating (not adult-led teaching) on these kinds of issues.

How young people intuitively see loans as an opportunity to enterprise, not as a financial burden.

As Jake says at the end of the discussion, “We’ve got a lot of work to do, let’s start!”

View the video (YouTube) or download the transcript (pdf) now.

Background

This discussion is part of a series bringing together social entrepreneurs whose insights and innovations build on cyclical relationships between biological, economic and cultural forces in society: what we call Nourishment Economies.

These Huddles help push further on insights, challenges, and opportunities, for the participating social entrepreneurs, for people considering launching such enterprises in other communities, and for funders, investors and policymakers seeking to help spread this positive force in the world.

Nourishⁿ‘s Nourishment Economy series is co-hosted with Ashoka. This particular Huddle was sponsored by The Christensen Fund.

Please add any observations, insights, questions, and examples in the Comments section below, or email to huddles@NourishN.com.

Harvard Magazine (May-June 2018) has published our letter about microbe-based agriculture in lab-driven vs. nature-driven industry and commerce. Our unedited text is copied below, and appears at Harvard Magazine online. Our letter responds to their March 2018 article, A New Green Revolution?

“Your article on microbe-based agriculture is provocative and hopeful, invoking additional ideas around the cast of characters and topics discussed.

“We know, for example, that E.O. Wilson prompted Norman Borlaug and his colleague M.S. Swaminathan to consider environmental implications of their work in the 1960s, spurred in part by Rachel Carson’s new book Silent Spring. At the time, Mr. Swaminathan coined the idea an “Evergreen Revolution,” referenced by Mr. Wilson again in 2003 in The Future of Life, and reiterated in 2014 by Mr. Swaminathan at the Borlaug Dialogue. This discussion spans over 50 years!

“We know that the new lab approach you describe hopes to mimic the spectacular natural symbiosis between microbial systems in soils and quality food for people.

“We know that those same microbial systems in soils are also the essential workforce generating social goods such as terrestrial carbon retention, water absorption and ecological resilience in landscapes, biodiversity, nutrient bioavailability, and more.

“We know that local food systems, aside from industrial agriculture, feed billions of people, and that these systems can succeed nutritionally, economically, culturally, and entrepreneurially at large scale by working in symbiotic partnership with microbes in soils. For example, the company COMACO and its 170,000+ farmer-suppliers in Zambia produce popular food products (and related nutritional and environmental services) by deploying these techniques.

“What we need to know, for making smart decisions with big implications, is how the new laboratory microbe approach relates to these systemic issues. Does it support (or inhibit) whole environmental/economic/health systems as soil-based approaches can, or is it just more incremental in reducing some negative impacts of historical industrial farming approaches?”

David Strelneck, M.P.P. ’92

Newly emerging scientific data intensifies the importance of fostering nutrient-nutrition-nourishment cycles between people and ecosystems.

POLITICO’s news article The great nutrient collapse, published last week, summarizes science suggesting that increases in atmospheric carbon are directly altering the nutrient balance in the food we eat.

This information is new and important. In brief, crops are apparently growing more vigorously because of carbon increases in the air, but most of that growth is in the form of sugars and starches, and bioavailable nutrients are not keeping pace. Per scientist Irakli Loladze in the article,

“We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.”

We have previously identified decreases in nutrient density and micronutrient content – and accompanying health, environmental, and economic problems of many types – due to decades of selective plant breeding, engineered genetic modification, and ongoing decreases in soil quality and biodiversity which affect nutrient qualities in crops and foods (and people and ecosystems). From social and business perspectives, these trends are fueled by a number of motives having nothing to do with nutrition, and reflect society’s lack of analytic and economic understanding of the nutrient spectrum’s role in personal health, food systems, and natural ecosystems. But we’ve never before assumed that changing characteristics of the air (i.e. carbon dioxide content) are an additional driver in all of this.

This emerging data raises a peculiar mix of surprise, alarm, and opportunity among the staff and affiliated social entrepreneurs and scientists at Nourishⁿ (Nourish to the Nth Degree). We have spent years identifying, supporting and helping spread systemic approaches that increase nutrient cycling relationships between people and the land. The foundation of this work and the value propositions it offers to public and private sector actors in society is the integrated health, environment, agricultural, economic, and cultural benefits which result, illustrated directly by the diverse enterprises and social entrepreneurs we work with. In fact, it is the innovative approaches of those social entrepreneurs which led us to recognize the unconventional nutrient-nutrition-nourishment patterns and opportunities (what we now call #NutrientValueChains) to begin with. Our 2016 article on the U.S. government’s Agrilinks web site provides examples, Nourishment Entrepreneurs Seize on Climate and Population Pressures.

In the context of The great nutrient collapse, none of these examples reduce carbon in the air as the primary value proposition driving their success, but a great many help replenish macro- and micro-nutrients in foods and people in sustainable ways (which now appears more urgent than ever), while also sequestering and preserving carbon in soils and/or forests as an aspect of the process.

Scientific commentary in The great nutrient collapse also highlights another peculiar, pervasive challenge-and-opportunity we know well: the lack of a unified scientific framework around these issues. Per the article,

“…tackling globe-spanning new questions that cross the boundaries of scientific fields can be difficult.”

“…how hard it is to do research in a field that doesn’t quite exist yet.”

 “When POLITICO contacted top nutrition experts about the growing body of research on the topic, they were almost universally perplexed…”

 “It’s been hard for us to get people to understand how many questions they should have.”

These comments are all too familiar in our global work. While value opportunities weaving across the environmental, agricultural, food and health sectors are often intuitive and clear to social entrepreneurs, they have proven challenging to discuss and analyze with technical experts in those fields. There is not usually disagreement per se, but a difficulty in talking with each other, as each field’s reference frameworks and sectoral objectives are so deeply engrained that the conversations become cumbersome quickly.

In this sense, The great nutrient collapse highlights how putting cycles of bioavailable nutrients (or lack thereof) at the centerpoint of conversations, policies and actions offers a practical mechanism both for bolstering vitality of both people and the land directly, and for facilitating cross-sectoral alignment over time.

On June 26^th and 27^th, twenty change leaders behind innovative schools and restaurants that kindle physical, economic and cultural health in their communities and their nations are gathering to compare approaches and spark new actions.

This Action Summit is taking place on the campus of the Native American Community Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. It focuses on the overlap of “nourishment entrepreneurship” and two of the forces we’ve seen triggering Nourishment Economies:

1.  Food businesses emphasizing traditional foods, including restaurants and commercial food processing at substantial scale, often with direct and innovative linkages between chefs and the harvesters of the food (on farms or in the wild).

2.  Schools that build nourishment-cycles into student learning and community fabric, including primary, secondary, tertiary and technical schools. These include classroom strategies and tools; monitoring nutritional and health metrics in students, soils and/or ecosystems; school meal programs; gardens or farms linked to student and community challenges; nourishment-entrepreneur role modeling; and more.

A link to key insights and actions arising among this interesting group is provided in the Comments section below (and we welcome additional observations, inputs and ideas here!)

Participants include a fascinating range of change leaders and support networks, including Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield, Sylvia Banda of Zambia, Mwalimu Musheshe of Uganda, Marta Echavarria of Ecuador, Sean Sherman the Sioux Chef, Lilian Hill of the Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture Institute, and many more.

We wish them the best at this Action Summit and in their system-changing enterprises!

Among leading social entrepreneurs, one Nourishment Economy pattern we see is restaurants and chefs triggering a cycle of social, economic and environmental benefits in surrounding communities, often at substantial scale.

Some of our affiliates, for example, source ingredients from tens of thousands of small farmers, while others work with communities to harvest native and wild foods as ingredients. They train and support these local ingredient suppliers, driving economic development both up and down the food system, and also — depending on local circumstances — spreading nutrition, food security, rural-urban cultural connections, and ecological resilience in terms of soils, pollinators, and other types of biodiversity.

This video, transcript, and notes summarize an April 2017 “Huddle” between four accomplished social entrepreneurs on this topic:
– Sylvia Banda, Sylva Food Solutions, Lusaka, Zambia
– Marta Echavarría, Cumari: Rainforest to Table, Quito, Ecuador
– Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef, Minnesota, USA
– David Strelneck, Nourishⁿ  (facilitator)

 

View the video (YouTube)                                     Download the transcript (pdf)

Some Insights from the Huddle

The discussion reveals a powerful alignment, which indigenous or traditional food enterprises can seize at substantial scale, between taste, nutrition, farming or harvesting techniques, and vitality in the natural environment.

Underlying all of this is substantial economic demand for truly great food –– with all of its social, cultural, epicurean, and health qualities. When discussing business strategies we anticipated a focus on market appeal and consumer-side actions, but it turns out most of the entrepreneurial attention and drivers of success are on the supply side.

Critically important for developing these enterprises and stimulating nourishing- or regenerative economies, it seems, is disciplined focus on the type and source of ingredients, sometimes at a hyper-local level. And, a tremendous source of information about traditional ingredients and tastes is local recipes collected from the citizens themselves. Sylvia Banda points out that provide vital culinary information and vest local constituents. They can also be repurposed in other materials, such as her traditional Zambian foods cookbook, to foster additional demand and impact!

Sean Sherman also highlights that, with disciplined focus on native ingredients by the restaurant, the consumer’s food experience — including the tastes in a meal —  becomes powerful for triggering public interest and education about the ecology and human history in a region.

The ingredients in your food, exhibited through taste and other senses, tell a compelling story!

Furthermore, we see in this Huddle and beyond, that these enterprises can become major drivers not only of economic development reaching into rural communities and farming, but also of improved nutrition among communities supplying the products, of social development and local entrepreneurship as those communities develop a sense of expertise and a sense of agency rooted in appreciation and economic demand for their products, and of stewardship of biodiversity in the natural environment with resulting gains for wildlife, watersheds and carbon sequestration.

As illustrated clearly by all three nourishment-entrepreneurs in this Huddle, they also signal great potential for weaving mutually-appreciative relationships between urban and rural populations, with wider implications for the culture, economics and politics in a region.

View the video (YouTube) or download the transcript (pdf) now.

Background

This is part of a 2017 series bringing together social entrepreneurs whose insights and innovations build on cyclical relationships between biological, economic and cultural forces in society: what we call Nourishment Economies.

These Huddles are intended to help push further on insights, challenges, and opportunities, for the participating social entrepreneurs, for people in other communities who will consider launching such an enterprise themselves, and for funders/investors and policymakers who seek to help spread this positive force in the world.

This Nourishment Economy series is co-hosted with Ashoka. This Huddle on Restaurants and Chefs was sponsored by The Christensen Fund.

Please add your observations, insights, questions, and examples of how you use this information in the Comments section below, or email to huddles@nourishn.com.