Field Building
As part of a capacity building grant the Lottery allocated Farming the Future £500K to share with partners in the agroecology movement. These resources have provided us with an opportunity to explore new approaches to building movement capacity and methods for providing financial support outside of traditional grants.
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This is not grant funding and this is not a programme open for applications or unsolicited approaches. Our Ambassadors are proactively approaching organisations and collectives to work in partnership with us.
Why Field Building
Given our mission to grow, strengthen and connect the agroecology movement, together with the Farming the Future Ambassadors, we have chosen to focus on taking a field building approach. In this approach, rather than scaling up one organisation or intervention we are embracing practices that build out networks, relationships, spheres of influence and collective power around a theme or mission.
Our field building approach involves working with many moving parts, supporting those involved to find a shared compass, greater alignment and deepening interdependence.
The aim with this approach is to support the wider movement to grow in resilience and connectedness, diversity and confidence, to see progress on key issues, greater collaboration between different parts of the sector and evidence of influencing thinking and behaviour beyond the agroecological sphere.
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We have spent over twelve months developing our approach, focus areas and processes for this work, drawing on learnings and evaluations from previous work and grant rounds as well the experience of our Ambassadors to identify areas of the system that needed additional support to equitably rebalance power to achieve a just transition.
Convening & Learning
We are partnering with Shared Assets as our convening and learning partner - together will all the field building partners we are embarking on a shared journey of learning and collaboration about what the movement needs.
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Shared Assets’ role will be twofold - firstly to act as a general source of support for partners involved in the Field-Building Programme through doing regular coaching calls, distributing support budgets, and making connections between people, and secondly to coordinate a sequence of collective learning and reflection activities, and distilling the learning emerging from these throughout the programme.
We hope by the end of the programme the movement will feel better connected, and have built on our collective work and knowledge to move things forward with a shared sense of direction.
Focus Areas
Capacity Building
Just Access to Land
Networks of Supply
Progression Pathways