Collaboration Hub

OUR APPROACH THIS YEAR:
The Collaboration Hub will take on "Designing Bioregional Transformation" using the 'Donut Unravelled' approach from Donut Economics developed by Kate Raworth. This framework helps us to understand the natural limits to our current model of consumption, the social and economic impacts that it has, and how we can address and overcome these - locally, and scaling up and out. Here, we can see things as connected systems, not separate silos.

WHY THE BIOREGIONAL LEVEL?
The Bioregion- in our case, the Marches - is offered up as the ideal scale to design and implement transformative change, as these areas share not only geographic landscapes, like catchments, soil and topography, but also common cultures and histories that share a common consciousness. This change starts from the level of communities, and is focused on building networks of connected, skilled and engaged people who come together over a sense of place and responsibility to past, present and future.

HOW WILL OUR COLLECTIVE IDEAS BE A TOOL FOR CHANGE?
The results of the Collaboration Hub will be used to:
- Strengthen and enrich our next iteration of the Bioregional Food Growth Plan for the Marches
- Gather evidence to support the need for policy change across the Marches, especially in relation to the new National Food Strategy and its call to have county councils and local areas to take more localised action on food, using a systems approach.
- Enable Welsh farmers to engage with their local food partnership as a Collaborative Action under the new Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS)​.
- Define what our communities and stakeholders need in order to drive transformation and how we can support one another.
- Develop and design appropriate programs for delivery via our food partnerships in the Marches Real Food and Farming Network.