The Okanagan food system is fragile — many local farms and food suppliers are struggling to survive.
Food Resilience
Overview
The Okanagan food system is fragile — many local farms and food suppliers are struggling to survive. This is due to external large-scale food corporations that aim to maximize profits at any cost, while extracting wealth from our communities. The power of OCS’s Community Enterprise holds the potential to Rebuild a strong and vibrant Okanagan food system.
Objectives
- Develop pathway to rebuild localized food resilience as a self-governing community owned food corporation with the scale of economy needed to match outside corporate entities.
- Develop pathway for community and private capital to invest in smaller farming operations, and/or, acquiring and integrating existing businesses to create a collaborative and collectively owned food corporation that has capacities beyond government initiatives and private enterprises.
- Currently the Okanagan only has 38% self-sufficiency, however, with a regionalized food system it is possible to increase our self-sufficiency to 70%.
Approach
Utilize the OCS’s proven Design Lab methodology to convene experts and stakeholders to collaboratively design pathways for rebuilding localized food resilience as a self-governing community owned food corporation. The Design Lab methodology integrates collective wisdom with sound business principles to test, build, and scale the community infrastructure needed for localized food resilience.
Success Outcomes
Once built and scaled, the OCS food corporation ensures all Okanagan residents have healthy and nutritious food to eat. As a resilient localized food system, the farmers and suppliers are on even price footing with the large corporate food entities. Collectively we achieve 70% food self-sufficiency for the Okanagan region, ensuring resilience in pandemics, floods, and global economy disruption