Evaluating the impacts of community food initiatives : a food systems approach

Abstract

In an era where accountability and transparency are increasingly valued, the Cowichan Green Community (CGC) and Nanaimo Foodshare (NFS), two community food organizations operating in Central Vancouver Island, asked how they can demonstrate the impacts of their work on the state of their local food systems. Keen to understand how activities such as cooking, gardening, or farmer-training initiatives affect not just program participants but the broader experience of food security on individuals, households, and communities, CGC, NFS, and I partnered to investigate how to evaluate the often-intangible impacts of their community food initiatives. Structured through the community-based research methodology and framed by the food regime analysis and food sovereignty theoretical frameworks, this qualitative, evaluative inquiry employed semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and an analysis of definitions to identify the evaluation method and evaluation indicator categories required of a food-focused evaluation framework. The findings guided the development of a draft food systems-focused evaluation framework for CGC and NFS, inclusive of an evaluation logic model, evaluation matrix, and evaluation plans. Our research confirmed that the successful application of this evaluation framework requires each organization to implement their evaluation plans in a manner that is: (a) cost-effective, accessible to a broad audience, quick to administer, and accompanied by supports; (b) developed with the community evaluated; (c) culturally safe; (d) empowering to staff; (e) reflective of the evolving food discourses; (f) and applies a broader systems approach; and (g) scaled across the participant, organization, community, and system levels of analysis. Further, our results showcased how such an evaluation framework could be applied to identify and bring meaning to the perceived immeasurable impacts of community food initiatives.