Who’s Who?
As the group arrived, I wasn’t sure who was a project beneficiary and who was a member of staff – and as we began, I wondered to myself if this mattered.
I was facilitating a workshop to explore the next steps for an alliance of projects supporting wellbeing through nature-based activities and community growing spaces. A participant suggested that we include project beneficiaries, as well as staff, to bring a broader perspective on how the alliance had strengthened support for wellbeing. A great idea.
So, there I was – unable to distinguish beneficiaries from staff.It only became a little clearer once we began sharing experiences and reflecting together, however, this wasn’t straightforward. Many of the staff had originally got involved as beneficiaries and many of the beneficiaries were also volunteers or paid support staff. Participants brought a wide range of lived experience of green wellbeing initiatives and community support and, crucially, everyone’s lived experience was equally valuable.
Rather than drawing distinctions between staff and beneficiaries, or separating people into groups based on different lived experiences, our most important task was to listen to each other and learn.
At a recent listening session in Cardiff
Is This Just Participatory Development by Another Name?
I’ve been facilitating participatory processes for nearly four decades. I’ve always worked with the understanding that better decisions are made when those impacted by them are involved in shaping them. This is the essence of participatory development – the cornerstone of my fairly lengthy community development practice, and exemplified by my experience with the green wellbeing group.
What is now referred to as “inclusion of people with lived experience” closely echoes this principle. Both terms recognise that individuals are the experts in their own lives. As community development practitioners, it’s our role to champion, amplify, and incorporate that expertise in all that we do.
But it’s also essential that we avoid ‘othering’ – that is, defining or categorising people solely through a particular lived experience. I’m reminded of a seminar I attended where participants wore name badges with self-defined roles. Mine read ‘participatory development practitioner’; another read ‘expert by experience’. The person behind this badge was brilliant and interesting, but their badge made me pause. We could all have worn that same badge. I am an expert in my own lived experience – so are you. But one person’s experience is not necessarily representative of a wider group, and we should be careful not to pretend that it is.
Whose Lived Experience Matters Most?
Ironically, we tend to centre lived experience in discussions when that experience has historically been marginalised, overlooked, or excluded. That’s what makes it matter.
People can be marginalised by discrimination or excluded by barriers associated with, for instance, their race, gender, age, education, and financial insecurity or compounded by a combination of these. Engagement with marginalised or excluded communities becomes particularly important when community development initiatives aim to represent a place – as in my work with place-based sustainable food partnerships in the Sustainable Food Places Network.
Representation and justice must be central to food systems work, if we want to build food systems that are truly transformative. By that we mean: food systems that support the health of the planet and people, by including the perspective and experiences of as many people as possible, to make sure that they serve as many people as possible. To get here involves engaging with and including the perspectives of people with lived experience of structural oppression and discrimination, particularly race. Failing to do so risks perpetuating injustice, not truly representing our place, and missing valuable cultural insights, and misrepresenting the very places we aim to serve.
But there’s a complexity here. Whose lived experience is selected to “count”? First-hand lived experience can demonstrate the reality of marginalisation and discrimination, but it is the personal and individual lived experience of a particular person. Of course, our personal lives are deeply intertwined with the political structures around us, but there is a danger of reductivism in assuming one person’s experience can be representative of a whole group or community. When we use a single voice to represent an entire community, we risk distortion – and possibly even harm. So how do we decide whose experience counts?
Food Matters’ Approach to Lived Experience and Participation
These reflections continue to shape how we work at Food Matters. Participation is the foundation of our ethos, and we’ve developed core principles to guide how we embed lived experience in our community development and inclusive facilitation practices:
- We recognise and value lived experience within all ofall our community engagement and development work. In doing so, we hold ourselves to our ethos of participatory development
- We centre people in our processes to ensure representation and inclusion in our processes and projects, avoiding the marginalisation or exclusion of specific groups.
- We create opportunities to listen and respond to the perspectives of people – particularly those who are often not heard, included, or responded to
- We avoid placing unfair expectations on individuals to represent the lived experience of others. We recognise the importance and validity of lived experience, whilst also avoiding an assumption that one perspective can stand for many, or that this is the only way to talk about the collective material realities of structural marginalisation.
Ultimately, we are trying a middle ground. We want to overcome systemic injustices within the food system by including the perspectives of those traditionally excluded from this world. Yet we try to do so in a way that does not tokenise these experiences or the people who have carried them; nor to put the onus on one person to represent their whole community, or place. We do so knowing that this is complicated and sticky work, that we are probably going to get wrong at some points – but we hope that in doing so, we work towards building more resilient, effective, and fairer food systems.
This Summer, we have been holding listening sessions with food partnerships leads and those associated with food systems work across the country. These sessions are helping us bring together thinking about principles, good practice and different strategic approaches to Representation and Justice in our food systems work. Through this process, we hope to begin co-development of a Sustainable Food Places Representation and Justice Strategy – stay tuned to see how this work develops.
Ben Messer
Food Matters – Lead on Engagement and Participation
Sustainable Food Places – Lead on Representation and Justice
Who’s Who?
As the group arrived, I wasn’t sure who was a project beneficiary and who was a member of staff – and as we began, I wondered to myself if this mattered.
I was facilitating a workshop to explore the next steps for an alliance of projects supporting wellbeing through nature-based activities and community growing spaces. A participant suggested that we include project beneficiaries, as well as staff, to bring a broader perspective on how the alliance had strengthened support for wellbeing. A great idea.
So, there I was – unable to distinguish beneficiaries from staff.It only became a little clearer once we began sharing experiences and reflecting together, however, this wasn’t straightforward. Many of the staff had originally got involved as beneficiaries and many of the beneficiaries were also volunteers or paid support staff. Participants brought a wide range of lived experience of green wellbeing initiatives and community support and, crucially, everyone’s lived experience was equally valuable.
Rather than drawing distinctions between staff and beneficiaries, or separating people into groups based on different lived experiences, our most important task was to listen to each other and learn.
At a recent listening session in Cardiff
Is This Just Participatory Development by Another Name?
I’ve been facilitating participatory processes for nearly four decades. I’ve always worked with the understanding that better decisions are made when those impacted by them are involved in shaping them. This is the essence of participatory development – the cornerstone of my fairly lengthy community development practice, and exemplified by my experience with the green wellbeing group.
What is now referred to as “inclusion of people with lived experience” closely echoes this principle. Both terms recognise that individuals are the experts in their own lives. As community development practitioners, it’s our role to champion, amplify, and incorporate that expertise in all that we do.
But it’s also essential that we avoid ‘othering’ – that is, defining or categorising people solely through a particular lived experience. I’m reminded of a seminar I attended where participants wore name badges with self-defined roles. Mine read ‘participatory development practitioner’; another read ‘expert by experience’. The person behind this badge was brilliant and interesting, but their badge made me pause. We could all have worn that same badge. I am an expert in my own lived experience – so are you. But one person’s experience is not necessarily representative of a wider group, and we should be careful not to pretend that it is.
Whose Lived Experience Matters Most?
Ironically, we tend to centre lived experience in discussions when that experience has historically been marginalised, overlooked, or excluded. That’s what makes it matter.
People can be marginalised by discrimination or excluded by barriers associated with, for instance, their race, gender, age, education, and financial insecurity or compounded by a combination of these. Engagement with marginalised or excluded communities becomes particularly important when community development initiatives aim to represent a place – as in my work with place-based sustainable food partnerships in the Sustainable Food Places Network.
Representation and justice must be central to food systems work, if we want to build food systems that are truly transformative. By that we mean: food systems that support the health of the planet and people, by including the perspective and experiences of as many people as possible, to make sure that they serve as many people as possible. To get here involves engaging with and including the perspectives of people with lived experience of structural oppression and discrimination, particularly race. Failing to do so risks perpetuating injustice, not truly representing our place, and missing valuable cultural insights, and misrepresenting the very places we aim to serve.
But there’s a complexity here. Whose lived experience is selected to “count”? First-hand lived experience can demonstrate the reality of marginalisation and discrimination, but it is the personal and individual lived experience of a particular person. Of course, our personal lives are deeply intertwined with the political structures around us, but there is a danger of reductivism in assuming one person’s experience can be representative of a whole group or community. When we use a single voice to represent an entire community, we risk distortion – and possibly even harm. So how do we decide whose experience counts?
Food Matters’ Approach to Lived Experience and Participation
These reflections continue to shape how we work at Food Matters. Participation is the foundation of our ethos, and we’ve developed core principles to guide how we embed lived experience in our community development and inclusive facilitation practices:
- We recognise and value lived experience within all ofall our community engagement and development work. In doing so, we hold ourselves to our ethos of participatory development
- We centre people in our processes to ensure representation and inclusion in our processes and projects, avoiding the marginalisation or exclusion of specific groups.
- We create opportunities to listen and respond to the perspectives of people – particularly those who are often not heard, included, or responded to
- We avoid placing unfair expectations on individuals to represent the lived experience of others. We recognise the importance and validity of lived experience, whilst also avoiding an assumption that one perspective can stand for many, or that this is the only way to talk about the collective material realities of structural marginalisation.
Ultimately, we are trying a middle ground. We want to overcome systemic injustices within the food system by including the perspectives of those traditionally excluded from this world. Yet we try to do so in a way that does not tokenise these experiences or the people who have carried them; nor to put the onus on one person to represent their whole community, or place. We do so knowing that this is complicated and sticky work, that we are probably going to get wrong at some points – but we hope that in doing so, we work towards building more resilient, effective, and fairer food systems.
This Summer, we have been holding listening sessions with food partnerships leads and those associated with food systems work across the country. These sessions are helping us bring together thinking about principles, good practice and different strategic approaches to Representation and Justice in our food systems work. Through this process, we hope to begin co-development of a Sustainable Food Places Representation and Justice Strategy – stay tuned to see how this work develops.
Ben Messer
Food Matters – Lead on Engagement and Participation
Sustainable Food Places – Lead on Representation and Justice
