Slow Food Impact support
Strategic support to Slow Food International
From 2015-2024, Slow Food engaged an external consultant, Catalys, led by Ian Baker; who has worked with the headquarters and Brussels-based staff to establish a comprehensive set of tools and capacities that have embedded impact and evaluation thinking within the organisation.
Having completed this decade long assignment, working with the Slow Food organisation globally too, now is a good time to take stock of the learning and indeed to evaluate the approaches taken. The work we have just completed could be characterised as network impact capacity building; preferring, as we did, to use the word “impact”, given the word evaluation is a bit of a turn off. In fact one of the SF Directors termed it “Impact harvesting” (i.e., gathering impact evidence), a term we really liked and one that resonated with Slow Food’s own food and farming focus.
When Slow Food approached Catalys in 2015, they were seeking assistance in gaining a better understanding of their impacts and it has been a thoroughly fascinating journey. The work has involved:
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Getting to understand the Slow Food “business”, including who we needed to work with in order to achieve the desired changes. Underlying this was the question, “who are Slow Food”, which was harder to answer than might have been expected.
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Identifying the needs.
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Developing a suite of impact tools to meet the needs.
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Developing a programme-led approach to implementation and embedding.
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Establishing a group at the heart of the organisation who could champion the work on impact in their own work areas.
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Reporting – very important to ensure that everyone is aware of the progress being made.
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Passing on the torch.
Stimulated by the pandemic, the impact journey has broadened to the wider network, with tools being promoted to groups across the world and the analysis messages shared with them too. Online impact workshops during the online edition of Terra Madre in 2020 were popular and contributed to impact practice being more widely adopted across the global network.
Support was mostly organised through annual work programmes, a description of which can be viewed here. In addition, Catalys provided support to the following Slow Food projects:
Altogether 10 annual support programmes were delivered successfully, as well as 5 separate free standing projects.