Paper short abstract:

We would like to share how our initiative, Make it Grow, has worked with community-based food initiatives in Zimbabwe to support project planning, pitching and fundraising, using Participatory Video Proposals. Result: multidimensional impact pathways and an enhanced sense of community agency.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we share how our initiative, Make it Grow, has worked with community-based food initiatives in Zimbabwe to support project planning, pitching and fundraising, using Participatory Video Proposals. Make it Grow has collaborated with nearly 40 different organisations, working to build agency to co-design and implement community-led food innovations.

Participatory approaches to assessing impact, including impact pathway mapping and narrative questioning, ensured that the indicators and measures by which a project is considered to be “successful” or “impactful” are drawn from diverse participant perspectives. The method led us to realise that community-led food projects have significant, unexpected and highly-valued social impacts (in addition to economic, health and environmental impacts). This is because community-led food projects are (1) embedded in multiple life domains and (2) become a platform that bring different community members together around a common activity and goal, opening up a space for people to discuss the issues that affect them.

We spotlight findings from three community-led food projects, highlighting the multidimensional impact pathways and the ways in which Make it Grow’s capacity-building process (co-creating a video proposal, fundraising) together with the implementation of community food projects, has led to an enhanced sense of community agency. For some groups, the collective process led to the unexpected outcomes of more inclusive problem-solving and greater solidarity in tackling community issues. By taking a participatory approach to impact, we acknowledged the value of - and the challenges to - building agency via community food initiatives.