Here are five practical outcomes you will Learn from the Activating Local Food Systems course:

• See the whole food system: understand how food, land, people, policy, economy and place connect.

• Turn ideas into action: move from reports and good intentions to practical projects on the ground.

• Design for place: learn how to work with the particular assets, needs and possibilities of a local community.

• Build the institutional recipe: understand the policies, partnerships, funding and structures needed to enable change.

• Leave with something real: develop a practical pathway or project you can take back and activate in your own place.

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The Work Behind the Teaching

20 years of award-winning practice designing and activating change in real places… From food hubs and community gardens to regional food strategies, agricultural programs, seed libraries and international food-system design: this course comes from practice, not theory alone:

Selected practice includes:

• Huon Valley Food Hub & Agriculture Program (won National Economic Development Award)

• Docklands Food Garden

• Shepparton Food Hub

• Dandenong Regional Food Strategy

• Cultivivato, Milan

• URBACT Sustainable Food in Urban Communities

• Magical Farm Tasmania & Seed Library

• Community Centre & School Gardens

• Festival Agriculture with Local Futures & Helena Norberg-Hodge

• Earthwise Society Regenerative Farming Certificate, British Columbia

• Innovative local government projects

• 15 years teaching in the university sector

• Editor, Biodynamics Tasmania Journal

I'm Emily Samuels-Ballantyne (Dr Demeter)

Researcher. Designer. Strategist. Educator. Founder. Action maker. Mother.

I've spent my life working at the edges of systems, asking what happens when we stop treating living things as separate problems and start designing for the relationships between them. From food systems and farms to education, policy (local, national and international), community development and local economies, I've learned that the most interesting solutions rarely arrive fully formed. They emerge when people have the space, relationships, imagination and practical support to make them possible.

That's what I hold.

The space to see.
The courage to imagine.
The structure to act.

WHAT WE CAN DO TOGETHER

SEE — strategy & systems understanding
IMAGINE — scenarios & futures
DESIGN — practical pathways & new models
ACTIVATE — projects, partnerships & implementation
LEARN — innate human insights, cohorts, workshops & capability building