“How can we radically reimagine what a regenerative food and health system in Canada could look like in 30 years?”
Over the last couple of months, Nourish pursued this question in collaboration with over 25 key food and health system stakeholder organizations. Nourish’s vision was selected as one of the 79 Semi-Finalists (from 1319 Visions submitted) in Rockefeller Foundations’ Food System Vision Prize, which asked for organizations around the world to envision “Regenerative and Nourishing Food Futures for 2050”.
Nourish’s work is movement building for reconnection - with land, food, culture, health, and each other. Disconnection from the ecological and social determinants of health has led to a great untethering of our food and health institutions from the abundant natural and cultural systems that give rise to well-being. Nourish dove deep into imagining how reconnection can radically transform the food and health systems in 30 years. We envisioned how social and cultural shifts can impact tastes and behaviour around our food systems, how new data systems can enhance evidence-based investments into the social and ecological determinants of health, and how centering reconciliation and equity work with the most marginalized can lead to abundance for all.
Click to read the 15 page summary of Nourish’s 2050 vision. The full version is on the FSVP website.
We believe that our resulting vision illuminates the interdependence of human health and planetary health and reveals a pathway out of our silos towards a future where we care about our food systems and ecosystems as integral to our health systems. Our hope is to provide inspiration and evidence for re-anchoring people and institutions to their places and histories - aligning hearts, minds, and hands around creating a more regenerative and just future. Existing interventions and pathways carved by innovators in Canada and globally show us it's possible.
Nourish’s 2050 vision for the Canadian Health Care and Food System will be our north star as we navigate transition pathways towards making it a reality with our programming in the next five years - Anchor Collaboratives, policy convening and a planetary food for health Action Learning series. We believe that dedicating energy toward a vision can be a platform for us to inspire and motivate people around the world. The weaving together of the well-being of our people, community and our planet is rooted in place, in the soil that our hands and feet touch, and the foods that we eat. From this starting point, we can build resilient food and health care systems that reconnect us to each other and to the land and water that nourish us.
Below, we invite you to take a step into a day-in-the-life of Niloufar, a Co-Director of the type of Well-Being Centre we conceptualize for 2050; a place that uses food as medicine and weaves the best of modern technology and traditional wisdom. You can view our full vision here, and we encourage everyone to look at the amazing visions that others have submitted around the world.
“We believe that our resulting vision illuminates the interdependence of human health and planetary health and reveals a pathway out of our silos towards a future where we care about our food systems and ecosystems as integral to our health systems. ”
A day in the life of Niloufar, Co-Director of a Well-Being Centre in 2050
Niloufar is a former GP, now Co-Director of the Don Well-Being Centre, a hub that provides care for the whole person.
This morning she wakes up on hard ground after the Centre’s annual Solstice Feast. She and her colleagues camped with community members, listening to Elder Ted’s stories about how this land came to be known as the Dish With One Spoon.
Niloufar climbs her way up the rewilded ravine, toward the wafting smell of roasting onions coming from the Centre’s community restaurant. Crossing the gardens where apprentices are experimenting with plant breeding, she finds her Co-Director Abena, a skilled farmer and community organizer in the clinic atrium.
Abena is watching the Well-Being dashboard update on the wall. Both have been closely monitoring loneliness with a recent wave of climate refugees into their foodshed. Engagement with the world kitchens program has been high, and the numbers are looking good.
Niloufar swipes to get the view of one of hundreds of Indigenous-governed sister Centres, Margaret’s Place, in a converted tourist fishing lodge. A band of pink light shows that Wild Sockeye stocks are up. She wishes her old teacher, honored in that Centre’s name, was still here for this.
Niloufar joins the Wheels to Meals breakfast program, where the morning shift clinical team sit and chat with the regulars before appointments begin. Then she works with Jean, the Foodshed Facilitator, on the Centre’s forward buying goals with local farmers.
After a lentil confetti bowl, she meets with the Mississaugas of the Credit River, who are working up a business plan for a land-based teaching centre on 50 acres bequeathed as reparations. With the resurgence of Indigenous foodways, the life expectancy gap with settlers has been eliminated.
Before riding home, Niloufar helps staff with pick-up of the week’s seasonal Planetary Food Boxes, set up by the vertical garden that’s reclaimed the old Don Jail. She straps her box to her electric bike, and takes off to her co-op to make dinner for friends and to digest the abundance of the Equinox.
