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The Community Building for Food Security workshop uses a participatory approach to facilitate community asset mapping, capacity building and action planning for food security in Alberta communities. The communities that have taken advantage of this great capacity building opportunity so far include: Grande Prairie, Lacombe, High Level, Blood First Nation, Cold Lake, Medicine Hat, Brooks, Sylvan Lake, Lloydminster, Fort Vermilion, Vegreville and Red Deer.
The workshops use the insights and experiences of the CAPC/CPNP National Project Fund titled ‘Building Capacity for Food Security through Mentoring’ and the “Thought About Food? A Workbook on Food Security and Influencing Policy” tools, processes, action planning guidelines, and DVD. The workshop demonstrates ways to use community development approaches including community capacity building, asset mapping and the Tosterud CAFÉ approach for food security actions. Readiness criteria was established for communities to address when submitting their application to have a workshop in their community. To view the workshop resources click here.
This GFSA initiative also provides some financial support/seed money to the same rural communities to jump-start the planning and implementation of their Food Security action plans (coordination, convening, transportation, child care, food, materials etc.).
As a result of funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada - Population Health Fund, GFSA has also been able to offer Advanced Community Building for Food Security Workshops to the nine original communities and additional revisits to four communities to assist with action plans and formulation of policy directions.
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