Nourish believes sustainability and equity are interwoven. We convened a group of 21 leaders on traditional Anishinaabe and Ojibwe territory at Wasan Island on Lake Rosseau from Sunday, October 6 - Wednesday, October 9, 2019 for a conversation on how the health and community sectors can collaborate to support and anchor Equitable Access to Sustainable Food for All. Read the summary report here.
For the last two years, Nourish has led a national community of practice of 25 innovators embedded in health care organizations and working to bring food into a more central role for health and healing. Nourish is facing a critical inflection point in elaborating its strategy for the next five years and looking to incite the health care sector to better leverage its resources to build health for people, community and planet through food. Nourish sees its convening role is one that weaves together the knowledge of system actors working across the scales of the grassroots, organizational and policy, to collectively steward a shift towards preventative health and wellness that sees the priorities of equity and sustainability as interconnected.
At the Wasan convening, a diverse group of stakeholders came together from across the food and health continuum — including representatives from hospitals, Indigenous health organizations, and community health centres, as well as food animators, urban farmers and community food security organizations. The health care and food system leaders turned toward the work of how inequities in access to sustainable food are part of what needs to be addressed to build health equity. We explored tensions and opportunities around how the healthcare sector is currently structured, and from this understanding explored how collaboration could address the imbalance skewed to sick care to more upstream approaches that invest in efforts beyond hospital walls into the food environments that contribute significantly to shape community health outcomes.
Equity and sustainability are difficult to hold at once, but they are interconnected in the pursuit of people and planetary health.
Existing power dynamics between hospital and community health actors need to be addressed in order to shift power and risk across the continuum.
Centring the work at the grassroots is needed to create an accountability for institutions to meet the needs of their communities.
There is significant potential to reconfigure roles, relationships, and resources across health providers, from preventative community health to acute care hospitals, to address issues of burnout and disconnection, and to achieve greater health outcomes for all.
The two-day retreat was facilitated by Vanessa Reid (Living Wholeness Institute) and the Nourish team (Hayley Lapalme, Jennifer Reynolds, Cheryl Hsu), who used creative and collaborative exercises to explore personal perspectives in the current system, and to generate visions of ideal futures together based on shared values. While we cannot re-create the experience of the retreat, the report will take you through, key moments, insights and momentum for moving forward in our collective work.
