People’s Food Summit

Lead Organization:

Regeneration International (RI)

Partner Organizations:

More than 500 partners in upwards of 70 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia, the Pacific, North America, and Europe include AFSA, OCA, SKI, IFOAM–Organics International, GOAD, Agroecology Network, Ecosystem Restoration Camps, and IFOAM seeds platform

Duration:

11/2023—11/2025

Overview:

The People’s Food Summit is a major event that enhances the connectedness of global work amongst numerous like-minded organizations and empowers the family farmers, pastoralists, and foresters who produce 70 percent of the world’s food. 

The 2023 summit was and 2024 summit will be held on World Food Day, or October 16. The 24-hour global, participatory, virtual summit starts in Oceania and moves westward through the time zones of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Featuring speakers from every region of the planet, the event draws more than 500,000 people from around the world tuning in to watch and listen to numerous topics. Promoted videos highlighting each region reach another 700,000 views, bringing total views to 1.2 million. 

Previous McKnight support greatly assisted in the success of the People’s Food Summit 2022, helping RI fairly compensate speakers, promote their sessions, and video-record them to continue to promote their messages. The intention is to expand the format for the 2024 summit while continuing to present the proven, farmer-based, real-world examples that are the future of our food and farming systems, covering AE, climate change, organic and regenerative farming, permaculture, agroforestry, holistically managed grazing, and many other systems.

Grant Aims:

The overall goal is to update the strategic plan—developed during Rl’s 2015 formation and prior to the organization’s rapid growth—with a number of crucial activities, strategies, and priorities, and set up planning and implementation frameworks for the same. The intention is to work from a master plan featuring sub-plans for five pillars.  

Specifically, the project aims to:

  • Conduct a master plan review of why and how RI exists. 
  • Continue to build a network as learning and action platform for local abundance and influence at local and global scale. 
  • Support an international director.
  • Hire coordinators for Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas.  
  • Create sub-plans for the five pillars: Network Building and Servicing; Advocacy; Education and Training; Communications; and Projects (Billion Agave Project and Recognition, and RI’s Regenerative Organic Carbon and Ecosystem Services Registry (ROCESR)).

Outputs and Outcomes:

  • Publicity team to promote summit and keynote speakers on various social media sites of RI and Organic Consumers Association as well as their websites and newsletters; potential viewership is around 2 million, improving on the 1.2 million reached in 2022
  • RI to match McKnight funds with those it raises from other sources