2016 Impact Summit

Two presentations on building partnerships for community wellbeing

1) Partnering around Pennsylvania SNAP-Ed Participatory Asset Mapping (Roberts)
The Food Trust has undertaken a participatory asset mapping project in order to address the questions of how to best reach SNAP eligible residents with our SNAP-Ed programming and have program staff learn about the communities within which they work. Program staff interviewed community members to better understand how they define their communities. Through the execution of the project, new partnerships were formed and patterns were seen in how far community members were willing to travel for different activities. The presentation will review our process for developing the project, how it was executed and analysis from our data.

2) Community Power Assessment Tool and the Examination of its Cross-Cultural Relevance (Imata/Kuroda)  The Great East Japan Earthquake and the nuclear accident in 2011 prompted all of us to contemplate what is sustainable society and how we achieve one. Efforts across Japan to promote local revitalization and sustainable development are taking place in light of the serious decline of rural communities. Since 2013, CSO Network Japan (CSONJ) has been hosting forums to identify common factors that lead to the manifestation of “community power.” CSONJ has developed CPAT (Community Power Assessment Tool) as a participatory, self-assessment tool for community residents to measure the “community power.” Through these efforts, CSONJ hopes to contribute to the larger discussion of sustainable society and related initiatives (such as “circular economy” and the “great transition”) in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).