Campfire Event: Vienna Food Policy Council

Each of our 32 Beacons has the opportunity to hold a ‘campfire’, where the team gets together to reflect on their progress and challenges so far. It’s also an opportunity for them to develop the narrative that will eventually feature in our Living Library. Here, Elisa Klein, describes what happened at the campfire hosted by the Vienna Food Policy Council (Vienna FPC).

The Vienna FPC is a civil-society platform formed by volunteers that work on the development of an ecologically and socially sustainable food system for the Viennese city-region. Six members of the Vienna Food Policy Council and two FIAN Austria colleagues organised a campfire for two days.

Together, we reflected about policy and advocacy strategies, focusing on participatory processes within different projects, and how to engage key actors in them – from policy makers, food producers, civil society organisations, to consumers as individual persons interested in having a more active role within the FPC.

Among different projects, we focused on the participatory approach taken in the “Food Strategy for the City of Vienna”, a project where the FPC works with the Environment Protection Department of the City of Vienna and which has involved many other actors in a feedback process to the strategy. This strategy focuses on different areas, such as quality of life, health and others with the aim to develop a sustainable food system.

In the frame of enhancing meaningful participation in food policies, it was especially interesting to conduct a mapping exercise to identify actors to involve.

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