I contacted Debbie Hillman, co-founder of the Evanston Food Council, back in January in regards to initiating a practicum. We met one Sunday morning and it was instantly apparent that we both wanted to make a significant impact on the local food community. Although Debbie doesn’t have a formal background in health promotion, she offers a breadth of experience in sustainability, networking, and food policy. Perhaps one of her most important contributions towards public health was in helping to coordinate the development of the Illinois Food, Farms, and Jobs Act in 2007, an effort to boost Illinois-based food and farm economy. Since then she has been involved in a wide assortment of food projects and initiatives in Illinois and in the Chicago area.

Debbie is just like any other community member, except she saw that there was a problem and she decided to take action. I bring up Debbie – a person who started her journey from absolutely nothing – because she has a very interesting story to tell and because she is the extent of my practicum experience.

Debbie and I started this year with some basic ideas and a few scattered concepts; our basic premise has always been to promote a change in the food system within the Evanston, IL community. Our initial focus was to create a community needs assessment, but the scope of our work has drastically evolved into something incredible. As a result, the Evanston Food Council created Evanston Eats: Food Vote 2013.

Food Vote 2013 is a participatory budgeting initiative to get the community engaged in their food system. It would first be appropriate to generate a good understanding of participatory budgeting before proceeding, since it’s a concept that not many people are familiar with. At its very basic, the idea is for a community to decide how they are going to allocate their resources through a vote.

Here’s how participatory budgeting would work for Food Vote 2013:
Step 1 – we would first generate a pool of funds through different crowdfunding and fundraiser opportunities.
Step 2 – different food-related organizations, co-ops, projects, etc… would submit proposals on how they would use those funds if they obtained them. For instance, maybe someone wants to enhance a community garden, or maybe a soup kitchen could use new equipment, or maybe someone wants to create a composting program.
Step 3 – each group that submits a proposal would pitch their idea at a community event and the community would then vote and decide which would be the top projects they want to get funded.
Step 4 – the funds are dispersed accordingly and the process is repeated annually.

This is a truly democratic process that helps to educate community members and to get people involved in their community.

In this fashion, the scope of our work as changed since Debbie and I first met in January. Right now we are continuing on with Food Vote 2013, but we are going to have to constantly reassess everything that we’re doing to see if this idea is still viable. Keep in mind, very few communities have utilized participatory budgeting and no one has applied this concept to food in the United States. This has the potential to be something very extraordinary and it will certainly help serve as a learning experience in spite of its success.

As of result of my practicum experience, I’m seeing firsthand how grassroots organizations work – networking, community outreach, and developing relationships are certainly essential to success. I wanted to take this opportunity to see how grassroots organizations work as part of my practicum experience and it’s been quite interesting so far.

Dan Jaris

P.S. Please check out our website for more information: http://www.evanstoneats.net/

Photo taken from our first public informational meeting.