Center for Regional Food Systems

This webinar shares the findings of key informant interviews and discusses next steps of the Michigan Good Food Charter Shared Measurement project.

This webinar is given by:

• Rich Pirog CRFS Senior Associate Director
• Courtney Pinard of the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition

Shared Measurement January Webinar summary

Shared Measurement January Webinar introduction slides

Shared Measurement January Webinar presentation slides

Webinar Transcription: 

Rich Pirog: Alright. Well, I wish everybody good morning. We about 10 people that are joining us remotely and so for the folks in the room, we'll doing this presentation from the sitting position, so just so that we make sure we have good sound quality for the folks that are listening in. This session is going to be recorded. I'm Rich Pirog. I'm the acting director for the Center for Regional Food Systems here at MSU. I want to welcome everybody to this session, which is an update on the Good Food Charter Shared Measurement Pilot Project and this session is an opportunity for many of you that have expressed interest in-- In this Shared Measurement Project to learn more about how we've progressed since the project started this past fall. So, we will-- all of you that are joining us remotely, please, you are only joining us via sort of the-- visually so if you have questions please go ahead and type them in the Chat pod and our speaker will try to answer those as she goes. And we'll also have an opportunity at the end to have more of a robust question and answer session and I ask the folks in the room just to, again, because we have remote listeners as well, Courtney will, our speaker will repeat your question so that the folks that are listening in know what the question is before she responds to it. So, I ask you to just keep in mind that we've got two audiences here who, the audience in the room and the audience that is listening in. So, this past summer, late summer, early fall, the Center for Regional Food Systems engaged the Gretchen Swanson Center for nutrition after a request for proposal process and we've picked them to be our research partner for the Shared Measurement Project. A lot has happened since last October, since we had our first call with a group of interested partners that are interested in the work of the Good Food Charter and one or more of the goals of the charter. And so I want to-- we have both Courtney Pinard, who is the research scientist for Gretchen Swanson and we also have Amy Yaroch. Yarock is it?

Yaroch, who is the executive director. Courtney will be doing the presenting today, but Amy is on-hand also if there is any other questions, so again, if you have any sound quality issues, please write something in the Chat pod but the most simple thing to do if you have any sound quality issues is rerun your audio setup wizard on Adobe connect. We only have the one speaker here and we don't have multiple lines, people speaking from different places so we think sound quality will be good. So, with that I'm going to introduce Courtney who is going to, again, provide an update; go ahead and ask questions if you're remote as we move forward and then we'll have a question and answer at the end. So, Courtney I'm going to turn things over to you.

Courtney Pinard: Sure. Where's the mic? The mic.

Pirog: The mic.

Pinard: Oh, it's just, okay. Hi. Thanks for everyone for coming out today. So, I kind of work this presentation with the thought that some of you may have not been on the webinars and so, on a show of hands in the room just to get a sense who was, who has been engaged in listening in on the webinars, so most of you okay. So, hopefully it won't be too redundant but feel free to jump--

I think one person online too has been on webinars.

Okay. Feel free to jump in and ask any questions as we move through this. So, you probably know who we are. We're in Omaha, Nebraska a nonprofit nutrition research center and we really focus on the areas including food systems and food insecurity and child obesity prevention and we work with a lot of different partners and projects with an emphasis on measurement and evaluation, so Shared Measures is pretty exciting for us especially given all the work here in Michigan. So, today we'll go through a little bit review on Collective Impact and Shared Measures and what this project is all about and then we'll present the final findings really from the interviews and the surveys and discuss what's going to be happening next and how we've kind of narrowed the scope to be manageable moving forward. So, you're probably familiar with this. The five conditions for Collective Impact and Shared Measures being one of them but it's important kind of to note where we are with this in terms of having a common agenda. I'm usually reinforcing activities and I think that's what made the partners with the Good Food Charter prime for a project like this and for Collective Impact because you kind of have a lot of these conditions either currently or developing. And the backbone support really refers to that organization that is at the center of it all and that would be the Center of Regional Food Systems and Rich and colleagues. And so, oh that's supposed to be a checkmark over there, can't keep [inaudible], but I think that in terms of where you guys are at and where we're at with this planning phase and implementation, I think that this first phase has really been in the works for years since years past and really is complete. And now we're kind of in the middle of this phase, different phases here in terms of getting on the same page and having that common agenda and establishing these metrics, so I think it's really promising and really neat to see the progress here. And so just a reminder, the goal of the Shared Measures Project is really to build the case for collectively measuring statewide food systems in Michigan and that's really just to measure progress on the Good Food Charter goal. So there are, there were a lot of things that came out of the interviews and surveys that related to the goals but also a little bit outside and we always kind of keep our line of sight towards these goals and how we're measuring progress because this has been established, you know, and there's been consensus around these goals for a while. And so just to, some of the steps here involved, we've already been through a number of these phases including identifying currently collected data, identifying gaps and overlaps and where the need is and where we can have potential successes and challenges. And we're kind of at this bottom circle here in the bright green prioritizing a short list of key indicators and we'll talk a little bit more about that today and what that means for the pilot and how we're engaging the advisory committee today later this afternoon. And that's really where we're establishing consensus, on what measures are most valuable and then there's going to be this training and support and implementation of a pilot, which we'll go through a little more in depth. But I think in terms of establishing consensus, I don't think it's, it's not like a "pie in the sky" kind of view that we're all just going to agree that this is what needs to happen. I think, well with the advisory committee and with you all, it's really, you don't have to agree to reach consensus. You can voice your opinion, you can you know stay engaged and that this is really just the first iteration of a Shared Measure System in the state and we're starting with, you know, what was coming out of the surveys and interviews and honing that down to a manageable chunk, but that's going to be expanded and growing over the years to come, so I think that's important to keep in mind. So, that-- the timeline kind of overlaps a bit with the steps I just went through but you can kind of see where we're at in terms of this sort of distinct project which is kind of sitting within this larger view of what's going to happen in years to come with Shared Measures it's like it doesn't end on December 15th, or December, this December 2015. It, you know, hopefully we will evolve and continue to grow and they'll be future iterations but you can kind of see where we want to start with training and capacity building and get a sense, better sense of where people are at in terms of that and then implement what would be the pilot. So, you can see here the results and many of you have probably participated in one or both of these components. So, we conducted interviews, some in-person and some over the phone and then we, with 44 individuals and representing their organizations. Some of them, multiple people at the same time from that organization and then we followed up, we thought it really-- we had a lot of good information from the interviews but a survey would allow us to kind of capture a wider view of what people were because we could only do so many interviews; there are only so many hours in the day. So the survey allowed us to kind of put that net out a little wider and we had about 71 responses and from our list, which was kind of waxing and waning as we went through, because some people on the list, you know, were out of state or, so we ended up with about a little over half of the respondents working on charter goals essentially and who had indicated interest in this project responding to the survey. And the overlap between the interviews and surveys you can see here 22 individuals who we interviewed also completed the survey, so that's, I think that's important to note. And so the emphasis of the location of work, many were statewide, they may be located in a particular city or region but their work really reaches statewide and then you can kind of see where it goes from there in terms of the interviews and the surveys. The East was represented well and going down from there. And then here, so we asked people in both survey and interview to indicate what Good Food Charter goals that their work relates to and they could check however many was applicable. And so this was just kind of a slice of the data here to see that in order who indicated work on these particular goals and then ranking them in order of the number, the top to the bottom. So the number one goal that was addressed by most stakeholders is that fourth goal is around food access and then you can kind of see the second, first, second and third, which is really about procurement and the producers in the agri-food business and the production side of things, as well as, the sourcing and procurement side of things kind of falls in the middle. And then those last two are the school related goals that Ag Education and then nutrition standards. So, not to say that anything's less important than the other but this is what the partners are working on. So, to get into the interview results, I don't know if you can really see that but I can send a clearer copy of that but this is really-- you have themes and subthemes below and I'm not going to go through each one of them, there's just a mass amount of information that came from the interviews and hopefully the report will available for everyone if they want to review these in more depth.

Read the full Michigan Good Food Charter Shared Measurement Project Webinar Transcription