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How We Work

Affecting impact change is complex and constantly-shifting, and the way we work needs to nourish emergent changes.

The solution may lie in self-organising.

Photo Credit

Visual Spring Forum

Affecting system change is complex and requires the ability to continuously adapt to a rapidly evolving context. Our governance approach needs to embody agility and nimble-ness. Therefore we have opted for a self-organising approach to governance, inspired by holacracy. This will help ensure that our efforts are best poised as attempts to nourish emergent changes.

This page explains how this works in practice, starting with principles, followed by an explanation of the beehive visual and the accountability practices.

Our Principles

Our members are guided by eight principles, co-created at our first in-person event in Berlin, called the Bike of Bees held in September 2022.

We believe everyone has the right to access and eat healthy, just and sustainable foods. 
We acknowledge that only a pluralist, participatory and powerful movement can generate the necessary system change. This can only happen by working and learning together in a joint strategy across siloes and issue areas. 
We want a world with predominantly, healthy, just and sustainable plant-based food and an end to harmful (animal) farming.
We acknowledge that Europe is both responsible and influential in modelling food systems. It has the responsibility to avoid negative impacts elsewhere as part of international solidarity. 
We focus on the transformative change of food environments in collaboration with a diversity of local communities.
We uphold dignity for everyone involved in the food web. For us to succeed, justice is required for all living beings and is at the core of all our work.  
We support transparency, solidarity and compassion between all actors in the movement and with other stakeholders involved.
We create and share knowledge and resources to build a body of political, investor and business champions to align food environments within planetary boundaries. 

We need to consider external trends in movement building and grant making, in which participation, dismantling hierarchies and addressing power dynamics are gaining momentum. For example, the Plastic Solution Fund – after which the HFHP Pooled Fund is modelled- is exploring a more participatory model for its grant decision process.

Inspired by the above HFHP is adopting  self-organising governance approach, based on holacracy. This approach avoids a hierarchy where permission needs to be sought. Instead, it creates a way of working together that sets clear expectations and creates transparent authority within an agreed clear structure.

People organise around an overarching purpose in sub-circles or honeycombs, and each honeycomb has a role and makes decisions (after having consulted others) accordingly. In this way we minimise  hierarchy. Each sub-circle or honeycomb is responsible for its own governance and the way it manages meetings and decisions as long as it stays within the overall purpose.  An innovative food collective from The Hague, called Lekkernassuh has adopted such a self-organising approach, explained here.  

Visually, we propose that our structure looks like the below beehive operating within our purpose, co-created during our first in-person event in Berlin. We have distinguished supporting units in pink, stakeholder constituencies in green and collaborative spaces in orange.

You can click on the honeycombs to find out more.

We act to radically transform our food environments so that accessible, just, healthy and sustainable food (with a majority of plant-based foods) is the norm and harmful agriculture ends. We support each other, share learnings, expertise and campaign together. Together our impact is more powerful and inevitable.

Our internal working practices are inspired by the eight leadership principles of the Next Gen(D)eration Leaders Manifesto

The Next Gen(D)eration is an emerging feminist collective that is convinced a different leadership style and practice is needed to change the food system. All of them are aligned with the values and principles of Healthy Food Healthy Planet.