Food Sol is an action tank fueling food entrepreneurs to create new food options that contribute to a brighter food future.
Save the Dates
October 23-24th, 2012 is Food Day at Babson College. Entrepreneur in Residence Andrew Zimmern (host of Bizarre Foods and Bizarre Foods America) will be on campus for two days of food entrepreneurship of all kinds!
Why Babson?
A healthy food initiative is a clear fit for a school of public health, nutrition or agriculture. But as the leader in Entrepreneurial Thought and Action™, Babson teaches its future leaders how to convert complex challenges into opportunities – for social, environmental and economic value creation. Thus, leveraging Babson’s signature methodology, Food Sol creates a productive, action-oriented environment by convening the right sets of players to tackle Big Food Dilemmas, collaborate across sectors and perspectives, and design the approaches that will drive triple-bottom-line business success in food.
What are the Big Food Dilemmas?
The number and scale of dilemmas linked to the global food system are complex, intertwined and daunting, but they are not insurmountable. As a global community, we are faced with:
- Healthcare challenges based on both scarcity and overconsumption
- Dwindling global supply and distribution imbalances
- Land and water degradation
- Increased energy demands and climate change implications
- Questions of food safety
- Inefficient and unsustainable government subsidies
- Economic and regulatory pressures that threaten family farms
- Health and environmental concerns exacerbated by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
- Antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering the human population through the food chain
- Inequitable labor practices and standards
Few agreements are in place to define any of the Big Food Dilemmas - let alone determine a path forward.
Where are the Opportunities?
Thousands of movements are already underway – from neighborhood to national in scope – to redesign our food system. Initiatives seeded by government, philanthropists, and business are all doing their parts to make change. Food Sol enters with a unique offering: use the country’s top entrepreneurial problem solving strategies to drive sustainable food system innovations.
Babson’s creative reasoning (CreAction) quite resembles sitting down to dinner. This is because people think and act the same way we eat: in bite-sized pieces. Although the Big Food Dilemmas may seem overwhelming, when dynamic, innovative thinkers sit down together – armed with proven entrepreneurial process – they can design and scale change. Scaled change has the potential to become the new norm.
How we work
- Navigating the Big Picture: Enterprise-wide knowledge and cross-sector relationships position Food Sol to connect dots and provide resources to raise awareness and drive smart action and activity in the food system.
- Engagements: Food Sol employs the “UnCommon Table” approach coupled with Entrepreneurial Thought and Action™ and Entrepreneurship of All Kinds™ to support a radical shift from adversarial, zero-sum thinking to alliance-focused, abundance thinking. The right set of partners and the right approach can drive significant, lasting change in any sector.
- Thought leadership: Food Sol provides Babson’s voice on food system dilemmas and innovations with potential.
- Economic sustainability as a core focus: Triple-bottom-line success does not exist with a missing leg. Combining the social and environmental aims of food system redesign with proven economic sustainability strategies ensure that new designs stick.
What is The UnCommon Table™?
The UnCommon Table™ a unique design approach bringing multiple stakeholders and multiple mindsets together with the distinct purpose of catalyzing action in addressing a particular problem or social challengeo one sector can solve any one problem and traditionally, sectors meet within designs based on an adversarial model – zero sum actions, assumption of scarce resources, and established mindsets. The UnCommon Table™ is based on another design – one not focused on deficits, but rather on abundance – where individual sectors find their self-interests better served in a community than on their own.
Food Sol’s first application of the UnCommon Table™ approach is a signature two-day training, offered three times per year in Fall, Summer and Winter, co-designed with community organizers, students and faculty.
Aspects and portions of the trainings that make easy online action-learning lessons will be streamed live. Leveraging our existent and growing social media networks and audiences, we can reach greater and greater sets of constituents – beyond the four walls of the given training.
At its core, every training delivers on the proven principles and methodologies of entrepreneurship and community organizing. Our partners at Tufts University in the Positive Deviance Initiative are guiding us from the lens of 22 years of rich in-the-field R&D as to how to effectively frame and teach the tools that spur lasting community innovation. This training aims to rapidly iterate, accelerate, and extend the models that drive lasting impact in food-access challenged communities.
The lessons of the trainings feed monthly webinars – accessible to all learners, both on and off college campuses, who wish to locate their own path to relevant work in the area of urban food inequity.
Food Sol is designing the first training to confront cases of urban food inequity. However, this approach is applicable to addressing any dilemma space. The right sets of players taking defined action, in concert can produce solutions to fit any complex challenge, including educating kids, healthy kids, secure families, racial equality and civic engagement.
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