Building the Collaboration

By Lindsay Cole, Manager of the City of Vancouver Solutions Lab

Welcome to Learning out Loud! This is where CFIL collaborators reflect on what we’ve been learning and trying in this experimental space. Thanks for joining us on our journey, and if you have any thoughts on what you’re reading we’d be happy to hear from you!

The Circular Food Innovation Lab (CFIL) is part of a longer journey of social innovation lab work inside the City of Vancouver. The Solutions Lab (SLab) has been in operation since 2016, and has designed and facilitated more than a dozen different lab processes during that time. This includes the Grocery Retail Solutions Lab which ran in 2019–2020, and planted some important seeds for CFIL.

There were a few important lessons learned in these other lab processes that connect directly to the approach taken to collaboration in CFIL including:

• It’s important to get the whole system in the room by way of inviting co-designers with a deep commitment to working on the shared challenge space because it matters to them. It doesn’t work if co-designers feel like they are giving advice/consulting with the City, which is what most people are used to when we invite them into a process with us.
• The nature of the solutions that are needed in this challenge space are diverse — they involve changes to policies, programs, services, data and measurement, business and entrepreneurial activities, public narrative, and many others. This meant that we needed to build a collaboration that reflected this diversity while still bounding/containing it to make sure that it had a clear center to hold people’s interest, focus, and commitment.
• Most of our labs stopped at the stage of a first cycle of rapid and low-fidelity prototyping (for a variety of reasons), resulting in a massive gap between this stage and a program-, policy-, or project-ready solution. Support for higher quality and higher fidelity cycles of prototyping needed to be added to the lab processes if tangible, systemic solutions had a chance of being scaled up/out/deep.
• Vancouver, like many cities, does not yet have in-house design expertise to develop and test higher fidelity prototypes so we needed to find a way to bring systemic design capacity and talent on to our team.

Four Collaboration Moves

These lessons inspired four important moves related to collaboration as CFIL was being imagined and conceptualized.

First, SLab and the project manager and subject matter expert in the City’s Solid Waste Strategic Services (SWSS) department realised early on that we would need design capacities on our team, and in order to do that we would need to raise external funds. The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance supports about 40 international cities leading on climate change work, and provides a ‘Game Changer Fund’ for cities that want to try something different. We wrote a successful application to this fund, and will share what we did and what we learned with the larger network of cities working to increase and speed up their climate action. This blog series is a part of this commitment to learning-out-loud, in solidarity with other cities.

Second, based on the experiences in the Grocery Retail Solutions Lab, we knew that we wanted the center of CFIL to focus on aspects of the food waste system that businesses could take leadership in, and also those that other agencies (public sector, economic development) could enable through their own work. Vancouver has a long-standing collaborative relationship with the Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC), responsible for a variety of economic development activities in the region. In recent years VEC has had an increasing focus on green jobs, circular economy, and just transition and is also deeply networked with small, medium, and large businesses working in different aspects of the food system in Vancouver, so they were a natural partner.

The third collaborative question/move was about where we might find our talented design team. Emily Carr University of Art and Design (ECUAD), and the Shumka Center for Creative Entrepreneurship, were perfect partners. The Shumka team regularly partners with the community on design challenges, and the university is full of talented designers ready to put their skills to use on real world challenges. The MITACS program provides funding for current and recently graduated students, so this growing collaboration was able to access additional funds to support the designers needed for this project.

Finally, and most importantly, we needed to recruit the businesses that would be the center of CFIL. An open call was issued by the City and VEC for participation in the lab, inviting food retailers, restaurants, breweries, bakeries, distributors and wholesalers, farmers market associations, and food rescuers to join this call to adventure. Prospective participants were asked to complete an initial intake form to understand their motivations for joining the lab. Those who signed up were asked to sign a Mutual Confidentiality Non-disclosure Agreement to enable businesses to participate fully and safely, as food handling and food waste practices can be vulnerable conversations. Eighteen businesses have signed up, with more continuing to show interest about what’s happening in the lab.

Disclaimer: the opinions and perspectives expressed within each of these posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and perspectives of all CFIL participants.