Community-driven initiatives to strengthen local food security and food sovereignty: Scale-up of the Learning Circles approach with First Nations communities

• Main Author: Domingo, Ashleigh
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Waterloo 2022
• Subjects: First Nations; food security; community-engaged research; decolonization; implementation science; Canada
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10012/18337

Background: Community-driven initiatives to enhance food security and food sovereignty have supported Indigenous self-determination of food practices including revitalization of traditional food systems to promote holistic wellness through connections to the land. Highlighted are two community-based initiatives to strengthen First Nations food security, sustainable food systems, and food sovereignty in western and central Canada: Towards food security and food sovereignty with partnering Williams Treaties First Nations (WTFN); and Learning Circles: Local Healthy Food to School (LC:LHF2S). Objectives: (1) Apply two-eyed seeing to build a shared understanding of food security and sustainability with the Williams Treaties First Nations. (2) Document the priorities, challenges and opportunities of WTFN communities to enhance local food access and food system sustainability. (3) Use the ABLe Change Framework to assess scale-up of the learning circles (LC) approach for collaborative planning and action, as applied to the local and traditional food systems of four distinct First Nations school communities participating in the LHF2S project. (4) Identify key learnings and successes of scaling-up the LC model within LHF2S participating communities and opportunities to leverage the approach in other communities with shared priorities, such as the WTFN. Methods: Decolonizing approaches and an implementations science framework were used to undertake this participatory research with First Nations communities. To support objectives 1 and 2, an Indigenous method, storytelling, was used in community-based dialogue sessions to understand WTFN perspectives of food security, sustainability and projects of interest. For objectives 3 and 4, data were analyzed from the LC:LHF2S initiative to assess the LC process as a participatory approach to iterative planning for food system actions within divers Indigenous community contexts. An implementation science framework, Foster-Fishman and Watson’s (2012) ABLe Change Framework, was ...