Collaborative Planning

The development of the original Community of Practice was a learning process itself. We wanted to document and share our process as a way to track our own progress and possibly help others seeking to create a similar initiative.

The first full Planning Committee meeting began with a comprehensive overview of the learnings from the Farmer Discussion Sessions. That was followed by an activity designed to identify what knowledge, skills, and resources members of the Community of Practice already hold in relation to the primary topics. 

These topics included: Working with Interest Groups & Network-Building, Food System Plan Development, Food Policy Advocacy & Organizing, Tracking and Sharing Progress, and Other Ideas/Gaps.

Our second full Planning Committee meeting involved a deliberative process to hone in on our shared learning goals by mapping on where we had multiple state representatives with experiences in each of the five initial categories identified. Building on previous activities, we discussed what would be most important to cover in a 90-minute learning session, and in doing so, members shared about their work and challenges they would like to have time to address. 

This passive activity was designed to give members more time to think carefully about their own learning goals and help refine the details for the learning sessions. 

We synthesized the information gained from the previous activities and set up a passive “homework” activity in which we asked members to fill in further information and offer feedback for each of the draft learning sessions. The activity gave us a chance to identify more specific learning goals for each topic, highlight any gaps in the potential topic list or areas where we might want to bring in outside expertise. 

In this document, we created draft outlines of the four learning sessions and then asked Committee members to review each section in the following steps:

1. Draft Essential question*: Please comment/suggest if you have ideas, questions, or suggestions for changes to refine that essential question

2. Scheduling: Add your availability/preferences

3. Summary of our Experience: Review and add your own experience if it’s not reflected there. 

4. Focus: If you have particular items or topics you hope we can address in this learning session, note it here

5. Outside Resources: Are there any tools, speakers, or other resources you find helpful for this topic we should consider or that you would like to share?

6. Sign Up: If you want to help plan/facilitate this discussion, add your name! We’ll work with everyone to schedule a planning session.

The feedback here has been the most crucial as we began facilitation planning for our learning sessions. This allowed the small-group learning session planning committee to consider the best activities and format to address the goals of each session. We are still building from this document as we create our third and fourth learning sessions.