WEAVING FOR A THRIVING PLANET 27 System Change Incredible Edible’s twelve years of experience have highlighted the need for an increasing number of citizens to have the right to use their local public area to feed and sustain themselves and their communities. IE thus promotes the communities’ right to community spaces for food-related activities that spark active citizenship. Frame Change: Mindset Shift Focus Incredible Edible inspires and informs citizens to empower them to take a quantum leap of responsibility around food. This, in turn, creates a sense of readiness and encourages organizations to welcome and support citizen-led approaches. Community-based Approach Citizens’ Incredible Edible groups create edible plots that help everyone in the area re-imagine public space use, spark conversations, and more significant community-action. In turn, this changes the way people relate to each other and their local institutions, stimulates local economic activity, and ultimately paves the way for people and communities to take care of their own future. IE believes the importance of wellbeing, healthy activity, and climate change continues to rise in everyone’s agenda. Therefore, interest in IE’s grassroots approach is increasing too. Scaling & Replication Scaling & Replication Strategy: IE has two main approaches to scale up: 1) Creating a grassroots governance model to spread the model and to inspire more groups to start their own Incredible Edible. 2) Campaigning for a community right to community land by investing in citizens and anchor professionals’ readiness to trust this grassroots approach. This aims to move from a permission-based model of land use to a rights-based one. Scaling & Replication History: Incredible Edible is based on twelve years of experience. From 2018 to 2020, IE groups contributed 127.500 hours to local food activities and created 9.500 growing plots. In the UK alone, Incredible Edible has over 150 groups engaged. The initiative has spread to towns and neighborhoods across the UK and hundreds of other settlements worldwide, from Christchurch in New Zealand to Montreal in Canada. The incredible Edible team lacks capacity to fully engage with the international liaisons but visits to the website originate from 160 countries and most inquiries came from US, France, Canada, Germany, UAE, Australia, India, Hong Kong, Spain, Italy, Japan, Ireland, Netherlands, Philippines, Belgium, China and Switzerland. Scaling Interest: IE wants to launch a pilot in the UK for a new form of governance around the public realm. The 3year program will involve activities that inspire and inform citizens, including members of IE groups, and helps to build self belief and create knowledge platforms needed to take decisions for themselves. The goal is to enable citizens, through actions around food, to make informed decisions relating to climate change, environment and biodiversity and to be respected partners in local decision making. To have agency around their local community spaces. Scaling & Replication Needs: IE has a concrete plan and experience. IE needs people that see the need and have the means to support it. IE is entering a new scaling phase where more stakeholders are involved to start working jointly for collective impact. It is about a cultural shift and starting to put things together that people can test together. Challenges Incredible Edible faces 5 main challenges: • Apathy and passivity from citizens across society to respond and act upon the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity; • Dealing with top-down governance models, in which authority is still very much present; • The communities’ lack of confidence to bring positive change; • Dealing with rampant cynicism and pessimism about long term effectiveness of grassroots approaches; • Scaling up the very much needed behavioral shift and reaching a more significant portion of society.
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