Rainbows and Resilience

There is a lot of attention on the concept of building resilient communities, which implies that communities aren't already resilient. We know communities who are self-organised, where local leadership supports and enables mutual aid, where connections are currency and impact is not just a bottom line on a ledger are sustainable and thrive in tough times. This week we remember it's been two years since the terrible bushfires on Kangaroo Island.

Community leaders are not always the elected or even the selected, they often emerge in times of crisis as the ones who know how to get food or water from A to B, or perhaps know how to improvise and have McGyver like super powers, or maybe they have a knack of keeping spirits up with jokes and songs in dark moments. Community leaders are glue in tough times and we are in some tough times around our nation, drought is still being experienced in prevalent in many places, COVID19 is rampant, and flood risks due to La Ni?a is on the horizon for many parts of Eastern Australia this year.

As we gear up for 2022 and lean into the lessons of 2021, we want to give a shout out to all the leaders we have met in the past year. The people who are sharing their knowledge, expertise, ideas and creativity in building resilient food systems have shown us how bringing together all parts of the food system can unlock and unleash innovations and methods for systems change. We have been thrilled to work in particular with City of Onkaparinga, City of Marion and District Councils of Mt Barker and Alexandrina in South Australia, who hosted workshops in 2021 for the Enabling Resilient Food Systems project. Together we are creating and curating content for other councils and community leaders to apply in their own settings to drive towards locally-negotiated desirable future outcomes, and the development of co-created visions for their place-based resilient food system.

Just as the light hits a prism, there is a rainbow of opportunities to learn together, co-create ideas and test those ideas out with peers. Ethical Fields does this in projects with engaging and robust discovery techniques, in workshops where all participants are heard and not the usual suspects are supported to participate, and by providing mentoring in peer groups and individually. We actively enable generative approaches and reject extractive ones.

Ethical Fields will be building on this initiative and looking forward to the evaluative component which will be undertaken by Sustain in 2022. We will be also focussing on supporting emerging leaders in communities in their generative efforts in community wealth building in all kinds of systems. If you would like to know more about how you could get involved as an individual leader or as a community or local Council we'd love you to get in touch.