An article titled “The Dawn of System Leadership” was recently published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton, and John Kania and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in community development. While the notion of system leadership is not new—it is getting at si … Read more

This post is a follow-up to a webinar held April 17, 2014 on community food councils. A question was posed during the webinar: What is the relationship between food councils and food hubs? This post addresses that question. Food hubs have gained a lot of attention in recent years. Responding to this … Read more

I read a terrific blog post at Harvard Business Review (HBR) the other day about collaboration. The author explained that “purpose is collaboration’s most unacknowledged determinant.” Community collaboration has never been more important as today’s challenges are too complex and interconnected for a … Read more

Earlier in this Fall I reported on a webinar co-sponsored by the UNC School of Government and the Center for Environmental Farming System (CEFS) on local food and local government. The purpose of the webinar was to educate local government officials about how the local food movement can be an import … Read more

Last month I hosted a webinar here at the School of Government, in partnership with the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (or CEFS for short),  on the topic of local foods and local government. I was fortunate enough to have with me a who’s who of local foods experts to talk about different a … Read more

One might say that the local foods movement or “locavorism” is all the rage. We’ve done several posts here on the CED Blog about local food systems as they relate to community economic development. I posted a while ago about the local foods movement as community economic development. Sybil Tate wrot … Read more

Food is connecting communities to each other in new ways in western North Carolina. Last spring, Western Carolina University (WCU) held a forum on the causes and consequences of poverty in western North Carolina.  The result was the new Western NC Food Policy Council.   The overall mission of the Co … Read more

Rick Morse is a School of Government faculty member. By now most people have at least heard of the “local foods” movement. Thanks to Michael Pollan and his compatriots, terms like “locavore” and “foodshed” have made their way into our lexicon. The idea here is to create “more locally based, self-rel … Read more