Aligning Operations with Values in a Multi-Farm Organization
Organizations often profess values, but putting them into practice is easier said than done. This project explored to what extent and how a multi-farm organization (The Intervale Center, in Burlington, VT) aligned its operations with the values of the organization, its farmers, and its staff. Members of the organization participated by shaping the project scope and focus areas, leading to a major project pivot, pre-publication privacy discussions, and other unconventional approaches. Through these methods, combined with 17 semi-structured interviews, I grouped key findings into three broad categories related to organizational capacities: Navigating Differences in Economic Power & Social Identities, Balancing Speed with Accountability, and Responding to Existential Threats & Exploring Pathways Forward. The Intervale is an organization that many in our community admire – myself included: through this work, I shed light on perspectives from inside of the organization about ways it lives out its values, and areas that may need growth.
Below is a link to the full paper, which served as the research component of my MS in Food Systems at the University of Vermont. It describes the context of the organization, the methods, the findings, and the process reflection.
An unexpected outcome of this work for me is that I’ve ended up deriving a new heuristic for myself to use as I scope community projects going forward.
In the world of participatory (also called community-centered) work, there’s a common understanding that work must proceed at the speed of trust and that strong relationships are the key to all meaningful change. These truths are sometimes used as metrics to understand whether a project is ‘really’ community-driven or not. The reality is that it’s a spectrum - work can be more or less participatory. The practical question is: How might we, as facilitators or instigators of community process, assess whether our relationships are sufficient to initiate a community process where we can share power as much as we need to?
In any given project, we have some ambitions for how power might be shared through the creative process. These ambitions might be drawn from our values, experiences, our collaborators, and the power imbalances/inequities/harms we’re trying to address. These ambitions lead (through our facilitation frameworks and discussions) to process plans, which outline the actual amount of time we’ll be spending together for a chunk of work.
Note: If you’re reading this, and don’t feel confident that you have such frameworks, that’s ok! If you want support thinking about your context, or to hear about the frameworks I use, feel free to reach out to me!
The Heuristic
When we work with someone, over time, we can feel how much they feel they have time for us. I speak about their feeling of time because our economic-cultural system puts many of us - especially farmers - in time poverty. We spend time and energy on the things that viscerally feel important. This feeling that “they feel they have time for me” is a key metric for successful working relationships.
The framework here almost sounds simple: We need the amount of time our collaborators feel they have for us to match the amount of time we need to be working together, in order to achieve the power distribution demanded by our creative processes.
At The Intervale, I often felt like I couldn’t get quite enough time and engagement from my collaborators to create the right power distribution in the creative process. I felt like they had time to be my client, not my teammate, and for the ambition of the work (what it took to explore values-operations alignment, together, well, in a way that had enough buy-in for transformative results), the consultant role wasn’t enough (more on this in process reflection section of the paper linked above). That feeling should have been an indicator for me early on that I didn’t have the level of relationships and buy in for them to feel they had the amount of time we needed to share power and collaborate adequately.
Given that I couldn’t practically wait and invest years in the relationships before starting, I wish I had either chosen a different community where I already had deep ties, or chosen a project with a more concrete value proposition where I was could act as a more straightforward, more transactional service-provider-researcher, rather than than a facilitator of a process requiring deep power sharing.