Foodsharing Östersund (SE): half a year already!

Foodsaving News
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A few things about Foodsharing in Östersund (sweden), how I started and what kind of challenges, ideas and projects we had so far. I’ll start and try to get some information together.

I started in Feburary to share the idea of Foodsharing with people i knew, created a facebook group and held 2 meetings to inform people (only 4-6 ppl showed up). I also made a “logo” for Foodsharing Östersund (FSosd)
At the moment i am mainly the person who plans, organises and has an overview. But this is slowly changing and developing. (i am from germany and only in Östersund for 1 year to study there, I do not speak swedish well and as I am leaving in January 2019, I am looking to make FSosd independent from me :D)

At the moment we have two running regular cooperations in Östersund.
One with a bakery (3x a week) and one with a supermarket “ICA” (3x a week)

communication
We communicate via 2 facebook groups, one for everybody and one for people who are interested in doing some more organising. Also we use Telegram for last minute communication and karrot, as it has a chat function now, yay!!

managing pick-ups
From the beginning, all pick ups were only available via www.karrot.world. This is a good way to have an overview on how many people are actually active. Also it is a much better way of communication than Facebook.

Problems
as the connection with people is mainly via internet (other than for example in germany where you need to go to a meeting before you can do pick ups officially) it is quite hard to convey the principles of foodsharing and to create a feeling of responisibility in the individual foodsavers. At the moment people more often just don’t show up to a pick up.
We don’t have any rules about what happens if somebody does not show up, as we also do not have a hirachy really. I wonder how we can make this a little better, without creating a penalty system. or is it neccessary? :frowning:

cooperation with other initiatives
A very big help for us is, that some initiatives cooperate with FSosd and support us. SMICE and Studieförbundet Vuxenskolan (SV) are our main partners. FSosd is a “study circle” at SV and they print posters and flyers for us. Also FSosd can be found on both websites.
Also we are in connection with PUSHsverige (an initiative for young people that supports sustainabke activism) and with a few others.

Promotion
We had some events to promote Foodsharing:
-a brunch
-we showed the movie “just eat it” (in a community cinema, the screening licence was donated by the producers after asking for it nicely)
-a sharing station at a one day festival in town (we managed to get 4 “one time cooperations” just for this event)
-I hold presentations on markets, events and whereever i can, through the cooperations with initiatives I get invited quite reguarly now

-a radio report about Foodsharing Östersund in swedish

Plans and Ideas

  • a website for FSosd
  • making FSosd a “förening” (official initiative, or in german: “e.V.”) ?? Pros and Cons?
  • getting more people on board to share the responsibilities
  • having regular meetings?
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Thanks for your article! :smile:

I have two ideas regarding to this, although both mean more work unfortunately. One is to always do pickups with two or more people, not alone, so it becomes more of a social event. It strengthens the bonds between foodsavers and increases the feeling of responsibility, because the other person will be waiting for you.

The other idea is to have recurring in-person meetings, where people should show up before they can do their first pickup. It can also be used to plan the next steps in your foodsharing group, e.g. which stores to contact, which events to attend, how to distribute food… but of course it’s hard to find a common date for all interested people.

Karrot might soon get a feature to accept members into a group, with a preliminary pre-member status where maybe only chatting is possible, but not joining a pickup… or similar, as the exact functionality is not clear to me yet.

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Hej @tiltec, thanks for answering!

We do this already, so nobody picks up on their own. But it still happened. The good thing is that usually at least one person shows up, but in the end, he/she needs to carry everything on his/her own…

Yeah, that’s right, I guess we will have this soon. But as you said, more organising. It is growing much quicker now ( 90 members, 30 inactive on karrot) so it becomes more realistic, that somebody shows up. Also I would like to discuss with others how they want to form Foodsharing and to take responsibilities by deciding for new coops and so on.

This sounds good/tempting. Although I like it, that everybody can do everything and we don’t have only a hand full of responisible people. And Somebody needs to be the active person to accept new members.
We’ll see how it develops and what the others think about it :slight_smile:

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Awesome Teddy, great work!!

I’d wait with the association/förening until it’s really necessary (in case you need to sign contracts or get some kind of grant or donation), you don’t need some unnecessary extra work there.

Regular meetings are very important, from my experience, and I would not even dare call them meetings at all, because it might scare people off. hehe
Here we have hang-outs almost every Friday evening when we cook some saved food together, a great way to build community and a sense of shared purpose, which may lead more easily to people taking more responsibility.

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