Building on four years of participatory data collection with collaborators in Flint, the research team of the Flint Leverage Points Project (FLPP) hosted a scenario planning workshop in October 2022 at the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan. A scenario planning workshop is a place where community members and researchers work together to co-create scenarios for the future, based on previously community defined values and leverage points. A scenario is a narrative description of actionable pathways towards an equitable, sustainable and just food system in Flint, 20 years from now (2042). To facilitate the workshop, we created a workbook that provides information about what we already know about the Flint food system and a “Recipe for a Scenario” method that provides a set of guiding questions for workshop discussion. All of the scenarios build upon a set of key definitions, follow the “Recipe for Scenario” structure, and also draw from the Flint food values and summary leverage points identified through participatory research. Each scenario uses a different Big Vision, or key finding from the research project, as the starting point. The Big Visions are illustrated as an infographic. Scenarios build upon four years of research findings, values, visions, and leverage points defined by community partners to set the stage for describing actionable pathways towards a positive future. We developed a report with the four resulting scenarios that were co-created by community partners during the workshop. The four scenarios were titled: “Nutrition, Equity and Justice in Flint”; “Community Unity”; “The Peoples Market”; “Empowering Choices”.
One year after the workshop, we reached out to community leaders who participated in the scenarios workshop to assess the impacts of the activity. While data analysis is still on-going, preliminary results demonstrate that the workshop was useful to build connections between stakeholders working in different parts of the Flint food systems and also enhanced capacity to engage with food security issues by breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable parts. Furthermore, decision-makers have expressed they are including lessons learned through the Flint Leverage Points Project in the creation of a novel, municipal Food Policy Council.
The scenarios were made in: 2022
The scenarios look out to: 2042
