Q&A with Conseil SAM: On Using Data to Better Understand Food Insecurity
Interview with Erika Salem, Conseil SAM program officer
Written by the DSH Team*
Une version française de ce billet se trouve ici.
The Data for Society Hub (DSH) team spoke with program officer Erika Salem about the collaboration between the DSH and the Conseil du Système alimentaire montréalais (Conseil SAM), Québec’s first food policy council.
In a nutshell, what is the Conseil SAM?
Erika Salem (ES): Conseil SAM brings together a range of stakeholders interested in improving the Montréal food system, from food production to waste management, food processing, and distribution. It’s a multi-sectoral coalition of people working together to develop and implement a shared vision of a food system that allows all Montréalers to access to a healthy, diversified, local, affordable, and sustainable food supply. We seek to foster cross-sectoral collaboration to address five key issues, one of which is food insecurity.
Conseil SAM consists of 24 members who meet on a fairly regular basis, but we’re also working to mobilize a network of over 200 partners who are eager to work collaboratively to ensure a more sustainable food system in Montréal. These include researchers, public institutions, businesses, and organizations that are aligned with the Conseil SAM and that share the vision laid out in our regional action plan.
What is your role within the organization?
ES: My role is essentially to support the implementation of Conseil SAM’s action plan. As a program officer, I track projects, mobilize stakeholders, and disseminate information among different actors who carry out projects that are often very similar from one neighbourhood to another. The same goes for the regional level: stakeholders who work on the same issues don’t always know one another. So, it’s really a connecting role between the different people and leaders involved in building a more sustainable food system.
On a day-to-day basis, I develop communication tools, which gather information to highlight the challenges within the food system. I also identify the actors in Montréal who are trying to solve them. For example, the Conseil created the csam.ca website, and issued a call for participation to our entire network to establish our 2020–2022 action plan, involving over 92 projects, led by 55 Montréal organizations, make up this plan. The Conseil SAM monitors these projects and provides financial, technical, and communicational support for their development.
We’re seeing an increasingly high rate of food insecurity in Montréal, particularly since the beginning of the pandemic. Combined with current economic inflation, rising rents, and the impacts of climate change, this is an issue that will continue to affect an increasing number of Montréalers.
Which social issues does Conseil SAM aim to address?
We prioritize an approach based in sustainable development; environmental and economic concerns are fundamental to our actions. When we refer to food-related social issues, we tend to focus on food insecurity. We’re seeing an increasingly high rate of food insecurity in Montréal, particularly since the beginning of the pandemic. Combined with current economic inflation, rising rents, and the impacts of climate change, this is an issue that will continue to affect an increasing number of Montréalers.
Food has an impact on the environment — all human beings affect the environment through their daily consumption habits. If we want to reduce our environmental and carbon footprint, we must modify our dietary habits by reducing, for instance, the amount of meat we consume, increasing our intake of plant-based proteins, and minimizing the amount of waste we generate.
From an economic standpoint, food is certainly a driving force, particularly for the Montréal region. This city is a hub for food processing. We have an important industry here, and the organic food sector, restaurants, and processors are its main economic players. If we focus on the issue of local sourcing, we see that a lot of educational and health institutions have moved to incorporate more locally sourced food into their services. We truly have a plethora of parties involved in our various initiatives.
How does Conseil SAM benefit from its participation in the DSH?
Conseil SAM intends to have a dashboard to better monitor statistics related to Montréal’s food system. We have five major goals in our action plan, and we want to have monitoring indicators for these goals in order to track our progress in carrying out the proposed plan. The DSH is fully aligned with this initiative, given its commitment to collecting social data.
It’s very difficult to track all the data that is out there, and to understand who is experiencing food insecurity, what interventions have been undertaken, and what discrepancies exist around that. Conseil SAM’s coordination team has access to statistics, but they are not necessarily being updated regularly. The DSH has the capacity to gather researchers and technological experts who can facilitate a far more sophisticated geographic visualization of the data than we could ever achieve. The Hub can even help us understand some of the issues around data governance, which will ultimately elevate our initial mission.
Working with the DSH team will allow us to create a powerful and centralized tool for all stakeholders in Montréal who care about this social problem.
What goals has your team set for the coming year?
We are aiming to review the indicators that we pre-selected with the members of Conseil SAM and our DSH partners. We also plan to evaluate the availability and quality of the datasets related to these indicators: are they relevant? How can we actually use them? This will all be done in collaboration with the DSH, the City of Montréal, and the Public Health Department. Ideally, we hope to mobilize other actors who may have the capacity to contribute to the project without being directly involved.
What motivates you to participate in this project?
I think there’s a lot of potential. For me, it comes down to the idea that the use case is based on the issue of food insecurity. The fact that it’s addressing one of Conseil SAM’s main priorities — that’s what inspires me. The DSH has the potential to develop a tool that can provide a clearer picture of what is really happening in this city when it comes to food insecurity. Working with the DSH team will allow us to create a powerful and centralized tool for all stakeholders in Montréal who care about this social problem.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
* Compiled by Angelina Mazza; content revision by Karolyne Arseneault, Sara Selma Maref, Karolina Roman, and Erika Salem.
