Innovators in Rural Community Economic Development
The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service has just released a new report: “Food Value Chains: Creating Shared Value to Enhance Marketing Success.” This report builds off a writeshop hosted by the Wallace Center at Winrock International and the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service in 2009. I facilitated the 2009 writeshop, as well as a follow up writeshop in 2010.
A "writeshop" is an intensive, participatory workshop that aims to produce some kind of written output. The writeshop process was pioneered at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in the Philippines. Writeshops have been used to produce information materials on various topics relating to agriculture, the environment and health. Writeshop 1 was for researchers and writers to aggregate the "best of" value chain success stories and case studies from across the country. Writeshop 2 was mainly for practitioners and educators to take the content from Writeshop 1 and develop a plan to transfer knowledge to practitioners on the ground.
I’m delighted to see the publication of this report and the related resources, which I believe will be useful to a wide variety of practitioners. If the writeshop process interests you, we’d be happy to discuss how you might use it.
