40% Local and Sustainable Panel Meeting – 10/9/17

Agenda:

  • Updates from Panel Leadership
  • Workgroup Updates
  • Definitions and Criteria
  • Sourcing, Data Metrics, and Transparency
  • Governance
  • Communications
  • Questions from the governance workgroup:
  • Request for a review of panel and workgroup deadlines, in particular:

-What is the deadline/goal for providing our recommendations to the Provost/Dr. J?

-Do we know the end date for the work of the panel in general if it’s beyond the date noted in the question above?

-Do we know what happens after we offer our recommendations? How much of the implementation work do we dive into?

  • Discussion of “Local AND Sustainable” or “Local OR Sustainable” or “Local AND/OR Sustainable”

Participants:

Present:

Zia Ahmed

Sophie Chang

Casey Hoy

Julie Jones

Nick Kawa

Nicole Pierron Rasul

Tom Reeves (alternate for Calhoun, Molly)

Ryan Schmiesing

Josh Shekhtman (alternate for Hayden, Emily)

Mike Shelton (alternate for Bartter, Kate)

Brian Snyder

Kareem Usher

David Wituszynski

Unavailable:

Matt Brown

Jill Clark

Gina Langen

Mallory Reynolds (or alternate Stephanie Li)

Leslie Schaller

Colleen Spees

Thelma Velez

Minutes:

Updates from Panel Leadership:

  • Working on scheduling November panel meeting with the Provost and Dr. J as guests
  • Students have been reaching out to us with an interest in the panel’s work
  • World Food Day event “Inspired by Local”: 10/16, 1-3pm, North Residential Commons

Workgroup Updates:

  • Definitions and Criteria
  • Most recent meeting featured a presentation from Steve Culman (OARDC)on 4R Certification – group has decided that this certification won’t work as a certification program for our purposes as it doesn’t certify farmers directly; a strategy could be to support the development of this or other similar certification programs that would certify farmers directly
  • Will be a lengthy process to identify/verify reliable, independent certification programs; end of calendar year goal to review all certification programs that workgroup is considering as part of the sustainability matrix; Brian to send a letter to local or national representatives regarding their programs and let them self-identify in one or more of the five categories in the matrix
  • Reminder: to be sustainable a farm or source of food will need to meet one of the certifications in the environmental column of the sustainability matrix as a foundational principle, in addition to any certification in at least one other column in the matrix; for animal production, the requirement will be that vendors must meet one of the certifications in each of the environmental and animal welfare columns of the sustainability matrix at a minimum
  • Sourcing, Data Metrics, and Transparency
  • Lettuce, tomato, yogurt reports in progress – to be shared with the full panel soon
  • End of year reporting: will focus on lettuce, tomato and yogurt data, as well as possibly note what percent of the current food purchases analyzed to-date meet the definition of local established by the panel
  • Coordination meeting with communications workgroup will be scheduled for 10/30
  • Group in the process of formulating questions for 10/19 joint meeting with Definitions and Criteria workgroup
  • Governance
  • Working on committee co-chair; Tim Keegstra (Student Life Dining) has joined the group
  • Working on setting up meetings with Zia Ahmed and Julie Jones to understand how they make purchasing decisions
  • Communications
  • Summer 2017 progress report featured in 10/6 edition of onCampusToday
  • Nicole to follow-up with Terri Stone about onCampus Weekly posting for both graduate students and undergraduate students

Questions from the governance workgroup:

  • Request for a review of panel and workgroup deadlines, in particular:
  • What is the deadline/goal for providing our recommendations to the Provost/Dr. J? Do we know the end date for the work of the panel in general if it’s beyond the date noted in the question above? Do we know what happens after we offer our recommendations? How much of the implementation work do we dive into?
  • Fall 2018 is the deadline for 100% transparency in regards to our current sourcing; also the deadline for providing our recommendations to the Provost/Dr. J; we then enter maintenance/ongoing governance phase
  • Review deadlines noted in Sept 2016 and July 2017 reports to ensure workgroups are meeting their goals
  • Discussion of “Local AND Sustainable” or “Local OR Sustainable” or “Local AND/OR Sustainable”
  • General consensus from previous meetings: “40% Local” and “40% Sustainable” counts in meeting the goalbut we are tracking the categories separately
  • Food does not have to count in both categories but it may and in those instances we would want to reward those sources
  • 40% by dollars, not pounds
  • Will pose this same question to Dr. J and the Provost when they attend a November meeting
  • Once we define “sustainable” we need to revisit this conversation
  • May need to revisit our language to ensure that we are communicating clearly how we are measuring/tracking

Miscellaneous:

  • Questions for meeting with Dr J/Provost:
  • How do we affect university policy?
  • Are we looking at “Local AND Sustainable” or “Local OR Sustainable”?
  • How do we develop seed funding to ensure this initiative does not fail for lack of budget?
  • The leadership team needs to ensure that the Provost and Dr. J have questions now for consideration in advance of the November panel meetings that they may attend