Poppy Flint
‘This is Rubbish’ (TiR) is a community interest company focused on large scale, pre-consumer food waste. It is a crucial climate change issue and a useful subject for looking at both the environmental and social impacts of modern life.
Recently, TiR’s education and outreach work has moved on from an environment and climate focus to engaging in the more complex issues of climate justice and equality. Like many issue focused organisations we aim to tackle this problem through two overlapping strands of education and outreach, and campaigning.
Our latest project is both an educational programme and a campaign and has revealed some of the tensions between environmental education and campaigning. While education seeks to show many sides of the issue to promote critical thinking and raise questions, campaigning is designed to persuade.
As an organisation, how can we effectively do both?
Background to TiR’s education and outreach
In the past, TiR has conducted educational programmes, such as the interactive Edible Education performance the ‘School Feast’ for KS2, and run after-school clubs with youth centres for vulnerable young people, asylum seekers and refugees. Our walk-about Cirque de Surplus has been encountered by the public at large arts festivals and community garden apple days, with 50+ taking part in celebratory giant salad tosses.
TiR’s original Edible Education programme was designed following the principles of a values based approach that drew on research in ‘The Common Cause Handbook’1. We consistently aimed to engage values associated with care for the planet and people, rather than pushing the idea that wasting less food saves money therefore by default promoting valuing money. There is enough else that does this. This method aimed to help people form a long-term attachment to the environmental and social value of produce and the global benefits of ending food waste, rather than personal, short-term wins. This approach has been evidenced to have a positive impact on how people respond to other similar scenarios, rather than being ‘single issue focused’.
Projects are also created with education for sustainability theory in mind and focus on giving people a sense that they can actually DO something FOR the environment.
Given the systemic nature of supply chain food waste, this goal has felt challenging to achieve while being aligned to the organisation’s mandate. How do you empower young people to make change without implying that the problems of global food waste rests on the shoulders of the individual? We believe all organisations with a cause need to be asking this question. Creating a highly informative campaign that aims to explain just how the system has come to be broken seems a logical way to solve this problem, but combining education and campaigning (on a small budget) reveals interesting tensions between the two.
TiR’s latest project
Recently, TiR has turned its focus to revealing the links between global food waste and food poverty in order to make a case for bold policy changes. The goal of this project is reframing food waste and food poverty as both rooted in inequalities rather than one as a solution to the other.
The link between inequality and food poverty is fairly clear but to link inequality and food waste required peeling back the layers.
To do this, we have developed three animated videos on the subject which are aimed for aged 15+ but should also provide food for thought for people who consider themselves quite knowledgeable about food waste and/or global justice.
This new project combines complex educational content about global supply chains, neo-liberal economics and inequality with clear campaign messages about the need for mandatory food waste audits and a National Food Service2.
The tension arises because, from a campaigner’s perspective, a common rule of thumb is never to mention the alternative interpretations of the issues your organisation is trying to address. In trying to communicate a clear message, you don’t want to confuse the viewer or reinforce an alternative stance. For example, food retailers might argue, and it is commonly assumed, that because businesses naturally strive for maximum efficiency, reduction in food waste is inevitable in the free market. Including and debunking this claim in an educational video about the subject would be crucial to encourage critical thinking. It demonstrates that there are multiple, often conflicting perspectives at play in social and environmental topics. As a campaign, referring to this argument at all might muddy the waters.
Campaigning is about telling people a truth they can, often quite literally, sign up to. Education is about giving the information in a way that enables people to form their own questions and ideas. Our campaign video, for example, will wrap up with the options to share and sign up to our Food Waste Charter. This isn’t the sort of empowering, collaborative, creative education FOR sustainability those with the educator hats aspire.
Reflection
This new project has unearthed a number of questions.
A theoretical concern is: “was there a limitation to the way we applied the Common Cause framework, which is fundamentally about communication, to an education project?”. It doesn’t seem wrong to focus only on the social and environmental consequences of food waste and leave money out of the picture. The simple answer might be that it depends on the audience, style of delivery and content which was more environmental than social focused. But “does it strike the balance of being educational and campaigning?” and “does giving a clear campaign message stop it from being ‘good’ education?”
Our more immediate question is “how do we achieve both the educational and campaign goals of this project?” We hope getting this right will address the previous questions.
As the issues being raised become less black and white, which happens when human aspects of equality and justice are brought into the picture, the approach of selecting what goes in the frame pushes aside the nuances. By ignoring the fact that there probably isn’t one solution where everyone and everything wins, we are not enabling people to draw their own conclusions. Education about an issue has greater value when a learner can apply new insight / understanding to other subjects, in the case of farming there are parallels with clothes production.
To continue the money saving example, you can be told that reducing waste to save money doesn’t necessarily lead to any environmental benefits (due to a theory called the Rebound Effect) and believe it. What we now strive for is that ‘ah ha’ moment when a learner realises why, maybe recognising a time they’ve fallen foul of this behaviour change trick, and can think more critically when money saving and economies of scale are promoted as environmental benefits in the future.
By trying to address these questions and being alert to dual demands of campaigning and education we believe we can create a richer, more powerful project, but conceded that many more people will engage with the campaign than the full educational experience.
TiR is now seeking further funding to produce a series of resources and workshop plans for different audiences (KS4, 6th form, community food redistribution groups, grassroots social and environmental groups and NGOs) that will structure an exploration of the animations’ content. Once piloted and case studies produced they will be available for free online for teachers and organisations to facilitate.
References
1. ‘The Common Cause Handbook’, Public Research Interest Centre (2011) tinyurl.com/wp5c5vhf
2. National Food Service campaign tinyurl.com/4h6rs3bm
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Poppy Flint is a non-executive director of anti food waste organisation ‘This is Rubbish’ and established their education programme ‘Edible Education’ in 2015. Poppy has been weaving creative activities into her work as an environmental and sustainability educator for over 10 years, running workshops and in-school sessions for many organisations including the Country Trust, OrganicLea and Thames21. She is part of arts collective Trivium and currently developing ‘Treasure of the Trees’, an interactive environmental arts project.
Poppy loves being a visiting session worker engaging students of all ages but also believes education for sustainability needs to be intrinsic to a school’s curriculum and culture.
She has previously been the coordinator of the SEEd Sustainable Schools Alliance and currently convenes a group of teachers and educators who are raising the profile of education as part of the climate emergency solution in their local borough of Waltham Forest.
Contact: info@thisisrubbish.org.uk
More information: thisisrubbish.org.uk
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This article was first published in Summer 2021 in Vol 127 of the NAEE journal which is available free to members.