Stories of Community Food Work in Appalachia

The Appalachian Foodshed Project uses oral histories and digital spaces to foster community foodway growth through storytelling and learning.

The Appalachian Foodshed Project (AFP) community addresses the critical issue of community food security in West Virginia and the Appalachian areas of North Carolina and Virginia through a regional research, outreach, and educational effort. They strive to creatively work with farmers, policy makers, non-profit organizations, community-based organizations, and university institutions to build community capacity, cultural understanding, and organizational cohesion while implementing positive changes across the food system. This work includes learning from and building relationships with a diversity of stakeholders related to community and economic development; health and nutrition; environmental advocacy; social justice; and agricultural production, processing, and distribution.

In spring 2013, an initiative was launched to create and share narratives or “stories” that express the diverse experiences of people working for food systems change, and include the voices of practitioners from across western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and West Virginia. The impetus for creating regional narratives comes from the practitioners themselves who are eager to create a regional network yet struggle with the formative process of crafting and weaving their stories and actions together. In many ways, the crafting and sharing of personal narratives of community food work has been most important as a way to create hope, possibility, and a shared understanding of our everyday lived experiences for continued learning and community building. 

AFP turned toward the Whole Measures for Community Food Systems (Whole Measures CFS) (Abi-Nader et al., 2009) as one possibility to guide their narrative making process. As a “values-based, community-oriented tool for evaluation, planning, and dialogue geared toward organizational and community change,” the Whole Measures CFS helped them “see” how sustainable change is more possible if we embrace a more holistic and systems-level view of the interconnected ways in which we can build and sustain healthy and equitable communities (p.7). The narratives facilitate dialogue and a deeper understanding about how and why people from across the region, in a number of organizations and programs, are addressing the complexity of community food security. By engaging with the many meanings and world views each story has to offer, they hope to create new space and possibility for the work that lies ahead.

• Timeframe to Complete Project: 1-3 Years

• Cost Range: Free to Download; Project Cost Varies

• Key Words: Cross-Sector Partnerships, Public Spaces, Advanced, Strategies, Planning, Evaluation, Community, Implementing, Public Art, Assessments, Foodways, Oral Histories

Whole Measures for Community Food Systems is a planning and evaluation tool created by Community Food Security Coalition, Center for Popular Research, Education, and Policy (C-PREP), and Center for Whole Communities. Click on the button below to access the resource.

Stories of Community Foodwork in Appalachia: Opening Space for Storytelling and Learning was created by The Appalachian Foodshed Project. Click on the button below to read the stories.