The plan for this

As many readers know, my work to support farmers market operators in the U.S. since the time I created and led the Marketshare program while at the New Orleans non-profit ECOnomics Institute (now renamed Market Umbrella) from from 2001-2011.

Since then, I have offered technical assistance, analysis, resources, and networking to the 4,500-5000 market organizers that operate the 9,000 sites, as the Marketshare Director, as a consultant in my Helping Markets Grow company, and as a consultant and staff person for the national entity Farmers Market Coalition.

This has offered me a unique viewpoint to the challenges local organizers face in getting markets to thrive, and also the frustration that market partners sometimes feel trying to get market leaders to be open and strategic about the hard work they do on market day and in changing deeply embedded industrial systems.

Shoppers and neighbors of the market often do not understand why markets choose to be outside, why they choose to open only one or two days a week, why they can't buy "all" of what they need (like cleaning supplies), why the prices are different than how grocery price for the same goods...Explaining why this is requires an ongoing history lesson and some patience with those who are deeply entangled in the industrial food system.

My exhortation to market leaders has been to "not hide the hard work" from those partners and shoppers and neighbors. That to get to the level that doesn't feel like we have to constantly start over is to get to movement stage.

And we are not there yet.

My approach is to use Emergence Theory as my guide. This theory essentially suggests that when those working on the same goal are connected, new patterns and behavior arise. In social change work, it works as a "grassroots work upwards" theory. It also describes how isolated organizers can be seeing the same conditions and come to the same strategy (like a farmers market) and then when enough of those folks in various areas are successful at their local strategy are connected at the right time and the right way, it can then become a movement.

Fifty years into the new development of farmers markets to reclaim local agriculture, to bring back public space, to change systems of scarcity to those that distribute equitably, to know one another by face and name in our places...making it into a movement is next. This doesn't mean that we haven't started to build some power together- we have. But these are early days in that work to allow farmers markets to be seen by all as permanent places of right scale and right power.

The thousands of markets present are developing local knowledge and connections beautifully and courageously but until we are connected as a network in the right way and time, we will not change the larger systems that thwart our success.

So this gathering of our history through its founders and innovators is meant to be that connection to start the movement phase of our work, but to do it as a story, full of joy, fun, and tales about food and farmers.

Please come along.