Facing growing price volatility and food market instability, small-scale farmers in Europe are looking for sustainable schemes to make their farms more resilient and economically viable in the long-term. Among these alternative models, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) "is a direct partnership between a group of consumers and producer(s) whereby the risks, responsibilities and rewards of farming activities are shared through long-term agreements. Generally operating on a small and local scale, CSAs aim at providing quality food produced in an agroecological way.” CSA is powerful on many levels and its positive economic, environmental and social impacts have increasingly been substantiated during the last years, at international and European level alike. One of the best evidence of this recognition is the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization and Urgenci, the international network of CSA, in October 2017. If the European CSA movement has been strong in fostering peer-to-peer and hands-on experience sharing, then adopting a European CSA Declaration after a fruitful Common Ground project in 2016 and developing comprehensive CSA trainings for new groups, opening spaces for advocacy capacity building is now an urgent need. So to pursue our stepwise movement-building process, "Voices for CSA" is designed as a starting 16-month project for Exchange-sharing and Capacity Building on Advocacy for CSA at European level. The overall objectives of the project are to: 1. Share and develop best practices on Advocacy for CSA schemes and networks; 2. Produce a training European Handbook for CSA Advocates on how to develop context sensitive advocacy strategies; 3. Increase advocacy capacity within all participating organisations; 4. Improve position building processes within Urgenci and collectively draft a Position Paper on CAP. Our partnership comprises 9 organisations from 8 countries, mainly national CSA networks or supporting organisations of alternative food systems: Urgenci, the project coordinator, is the international network for Community Supported Agriculture and other partners are all members of Urgenci: partners have been working together for a long time. Participants to the project will be staff or committed volunteers from partner organisations, who are able and willing to step forward and undertake advocacy and resource mobilization, already engaged in promoting CSA in their country. The "Voices for CSA" project aims at reinforcing the "Advocacy-Europe" working group, empowering participants and engaging strong collaboration among organisations, in a bottom-up dynamics with peer-to-peer interactions: 1. During the transnational meetings (M1_Italy October 2018 and M2_France October-November 2019), 9 national CSA networks or supporting organisations will be offered the opportunity to share their national Advocacy strategies and refine the way they want to work together to draft a Handbook for CSA advocates during the course of the project, with inputs from the training events and knowledge-transfer within each partner organisation. 2. Two training events (C1_Greece November 2018 and C2_Belgium May 2019) will be organised, with a specific focus for each of them. The pivot/cornerstone of the project will be the 4th European Meeting of CSA movements and the 7th International CSA Symposium, which will be organized back-to-back in Thessaloniki. Within the Voices for CSA framework, we will organise during these 5 days a comprehensive training event on how to build an Advocacy strategy for CSA, taking advantage of the multi-stakeholder partnerships represented there. Most influential actors from CSA and Alternative Food Systems will be participating in this event, facilitating workshops on their key topics. An “Advocacy Capacity Building Session” will take place in Brussels on how to empower local CSA leaders into European advocates. It will both answer the needs for advocacy training and be used as a space to build a European CSA Proposal Paper on CAP. "Voices for CSA" will hopefully have a catalytic impact on designing a comprehensive Advocacy Training programme, significantly increasing advocacy activities at both grass-roots and national levels and in the international policy arena, with a specific focus on the EU institutions. The final objective is to voice out the powerful alliance CSA is building: "CSA generates practical, inclusive solutions to the food crises, with farmers and communities partnering to create and implement socially inclusive, economically viable and environmentally sustainable food systems. Hundreds of thousands of people in Europe have already proven that CSA works, by creating a variety of practices, initiatives and networks based on common values". Indeed, CSA offers European citizens alternative sustainable choices to redevelop their food and agricultural systems.
Public policies play a determinant role in shaping the future of agricultural and food systems; they can underwrite legal frameworks to mobilise societal resources in support of sustainable food systems based on small-scale food producers, agroecology, right to food and nutrition, food justice and solidarity. These outcomes are however far from assured. This makes clear that public policies are tools, not ends in and of themselves. Without proper meaningful engagement of civil society organizations to exercise their rights in the design, implementation and oversight of policies that affect them – in other words, make their voices heard – public policies will be unable to confront the challenges facing food and agriculture in the 21st century. Urgenci, as the international network of national CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) platforms, provides support, education and training on international and regional levels to its members on a range of issues pertaining to sustainable food systems. Within this context, “Voices for CSA” is a short initial project part of a longer-term movement-building effort for the CSA networks to develop and reinforce their capacity to engage in bottom-up advocacy processes across continents and policy levels. The voices project is a first step embedded in a larger plan, with a specific geographical scope EU-focused and ambitions set around education rather than policy-change (exchange of good practices to help develop and structure an education program). The project aimed at structuring and developing a capacity building program and tools for CSA networks in order to reinforce their capacity for bottom-up advocacy processes both at national and EU levels. It revolved around three main axes: to build a collective understanding of advocacy processes for the CSA movement; to increase its capacity to collectively positions or organise advocacy campaigns and; to develop clear internal processes around advocacy efforts within the network. The training program was rooted in the participatory learning approach and structured around 4 trainings, covering the 3 main themes. The first training offered an overview and first-hand experience of the global governance mechanisms related to food and agriculture in order to build the understanding of how advocacy processes take place. The second training focused on strengthening skills within the context of a network governance, to address the dimension of internal decision-making process for positioning. The third and fourth trainings centred on experience-sharing and building knowledge related to collectively organise advocacy campaigns. They anchored themselves within the EU context – namely, EU institutions and UN institutions for European level. Over 70 participants, mostly CSA members, joined these trainings, and received the honorific certification title of “CSA Advocates”. They gained skills in relation with: developing basic understanding of relevant food-related institutional structures, frameworks and actors at EU and UN level; sharing resources and knowledge on ongoing and existing relevant bottom-up advocacy process led by CSAs; enhancing skills to select and analyse an advocacy theme; providing technical knowledge on how to identify and build result-oriented alliance and networks; conducting basic strategizing and building common vision and; increasing people confidence in their skills and possibilities. The project resulted in successfully building a collective understanding of advocacy process for the CSA movement. This was validated through the collective production of a Guidelines for CSA Advocates guide available in 8 languages. Partners and participating organisations gained skills enabling their capacity to follow relevant public policy-making initiatives at national, EU and global levels. Participating organisations have been able to already use the knowledge gained in furthering their advocacy activities at the national level. It also sparkled involvement in advocacy initiatives at the EU and international level. This uptake was further achieved by and thanks to the development of clear internal processes for the CSA movement around advocacy, which enabled the articulation of joint common position around policy making and advocacy processes.