The Nutrition Injustice Workshop has three overarching objectives. We aim to:
1. Gain a crisp understanding of Nutrition Injustice
2. Accept the factors that encourage Nutrition Injustice
3. Inspire collective action to end Nutrition Injustice.
We will break the workshop into three days to thoroughly explore each objective. To fully understand nutrition injustice, 33% of our speakers and participants will be individuals, who can speak directly to living in a food desert, a refugee camp, in post-disaster recovery, and in unlikely places with food insecurity and nutrition deficits. The first day of the workshop will include:
1. Two keynotes from leaders in food insecure communities, including the consumption of amateur video content describing what nutrition injustice looks like in a community
2. Listen to a panel of food insecure individuals
3. Conduct a speed-dating activity where everyone gets 5 minutes to hear a personal story and needs of an individual living in a community suffering from nutrition injustice.
Since acceptance tends to involve inward reflection, personal or organizational bias admission, and a survey of data (or facts), the second day of the workshop will focus on accepting the factors that encourage nutrition injustice. We will hear from government, profit and non-profit leaders, who are already working in this space:
1. Local government and non-profit leaders with close relationships in food insecure communities, whose organizations have been successful and unsuccessful in improving access to healthy food
2. Behavioral experts on personal values, checking bias and assumptions, who would run exercises such as Core Values, Mission definition, and “How do I know I am right”?
3. Panels with food insecure community leaders, local government, NGO, and industry leaders on lessons learned (particularly corrected assumptions) from the first two days of the workshop
Lastly, to inspire action, we will include a 33% speaker and participant lineup that includes activists, philanthropists, designers, budding entrepreneurs, and influential leaders. These individuals will have little to no (less than 3 months) real world experience living in food insecure areas. The agenda for the last day would include:
1. Design thinkers on creating designs for food insecure communities
2. Entrepreneur idea pitch (with feedback received from their future customers)
3. Philanthropists and investor panels on what matters to them and what they will fund
I believe that no one individual or company can solve a complex problem alone. The goal behind the conference is to ensure the solutions are supported, designed, implemented and funded by all the right people – interacting together – in order to enable food security and universal access to healthy food.
A. I was surprised by your objective of “Accept the factors that encourage nutrition justice”. Admittedly, I don’t entirely understand this because I would think that one of the first steps in solving this issue would be to say that the factors that encourage this are not inevitable, but very much preventable with targeted efforts. However, I think what you’re saying here is that we should draw a line between trying to solve the massive problems leading to this injustice (poverty, food supply chains, etc.) and the more manageable problem of solving nutrition injustice given that this background exists. I like that wrapper around it because it does make it feel more actionable and manageable if I was at this event trying to come up with a solution.
B. I think an additional value that could be good is from our reading last night, and that is empathy. There’s a huge component of this event that’s about listening to the individuals that have experienced nutrition injustice and I think we often have a tendency to forget that we need to empathize with these individuals even though we’re in a problem solving mindset. I’m definitely to blame for this at hackathons I’ve been to before where I’m so focused on action that I forget to be in the moment and understand the person I’m trying to solve for.
C. I think the toughest part of this will be that we are trying to hold an event for a very marginalized community, both domestic and abroad, and it is very difficult for them to be able to take time off work or travel to the workshop’s location to be able to share their stories. I think something that we could do is spend a decent amount of time collecting stories before the workshop, traveling to these individuals and asking them to tell us their story on video. While we’re talking to them, I think we could also get a good sense of whether they may be able to come in person or if we could get them access to a video conferencing system to remotely join the conference. The more food insecure individuals we can get plugged into the conference the better, and I think this would require a lot of planning and creative thinking to pull off prior to the event.