Transforming Food, Finance and Society

Last week we had the pleasure of meeting Anthony James from Rescope Radio. Anthony is on an inspirational road trip all around Australia, starting in his hometown of Perth, across the top end and down the east coast. When he landed in Brisbane, he joined us for our monthly staff lunch and we had chat afterwards about the food system, our individual journeys, and what is required for systemic change to secure a safe climate for future generations.

It was a great way for us to pause mid-campaign and revisit some of the motivations for our vision. The Rescope Project is a fantastic initiative highlighting communities who are “regenerating their societies – so life on earth can flourish.” Donate if you can, and enjoy the podcast!

Food Connect Foundation

Food Connect Foundation

Food Connect Foundation

Food Connect Foundation's vision

Player Profile

Each newsletter, we’ll introduce you to interesting people who make up your Shed community. This month, meet Shed careholder and board member, Alison McDonald.

Nick name: Ali

Day Job(s): Neuro-architecture Consultant (BEEhive Brain + Enriched Environment Labs); Ambassador for The Hopkins Centre: Research for Rehabilitation and Resilience; Adjunct Research Fellow  at Griffith University’s School of Engineering and Built Environment; BOAQ Registered Architect; ARB Chartered Architect

Qualifications: MSc.AES; DArch; BArch/Env.Des; DArts

Last book read: Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by James Clear

Favourite Nightclub: Ground N Sound at Chirn Park

Favourite Movie: Hard to choose; love film, the story-telling, cinematography, direction…”Being There”; “The Upside”; “Trois Couleurs: Bleu”; “Hidden Figures”; “Out of Africa”; “Up”; anything by Luca Guadagnino or Ivan Sen; …

Favourite Holiday Destination: oceanic, mountainous or snowy

Favourite Food: If stranded on an Island I’d wish for fresh mixed lettuce & herb greens, pepper, lemon, avocado and ruby grapefruit 

Favourite Drink: Ginger Kombucha

Hobby: Art

3 People at Your Ideal Dinner Party: 3 local female socially-environmentally-conscious lived-experience philanthropists 

An Unfulfilled Bucket List Item: fly like a bird

Pet Hate: heatwave

Dream Addition to the Shed: Design for ALL

Rob’s Rant #1

As ranted to staff writer Ben Fenton-Smith

OK, I have an admission to make. Leading up to new year, I was toying with the idea of a vacation in Hawaii. After a busy 2019, I figured I’d earned it, and was thinking of surprising my lovely family with the tickets on Christmas Day. Unfortunately the plan fell through because (a) I had no money to pay for it and (b) the travel agent said we’d be sharing the intimate resort with another Australian family – from Cronulla apparently, called ‘the Morrisons’? WTF?

I smelt a rat and backed out, and to this day Emma-Kate knows nothing about it. (For the record, I gave her an 80s mixed tape for Chrissy, and a cassette player I picked up in a Salisbury garage sale. We’re all about re-cycling in this family, so she loved it.)

All of which segues into this month’s theme: “The Lack of Leadership We are Meant to Have”. What kind of PM twiddles his thumbs over a pina colada while the country’s on fire? Sure we all need a break, but fair dinkum mate, you had a conga line of Fire Chiefs camped in your corridor for months begging for a meeting about the upcoming catastrophe. At least pretend to know what’s going on even if you’re not going to do anything about it.

It’s unfair to say it all started with the Steve Smith ball handling crisis, but we’ve lacked real leadership in Australia for a long time now. Corporate Australia, media barons, myopic pollies. We’re fed up!

But I’m an optimist. There are actually inspirational leaders everywhere – they just don’t tend to appear in the back-slapping Invasion Day Awards list. The likes of the Fire Chiefs willing to speak truth to power. Or kids striking for the climate, telling us old farts to get stuffed and get moving! (I’m pretty sure Elsie didn’t just want the day off school.) Or the dairy farmers who took matters into their own hands around Coles not paying out the promised drought levy. (They took it to ASIC and five months later Coles were forced to stump up. Enough to make an old dairy farmer like me cry into his Ballistic beer.)

Ordinary people who normally just get on with it are starting to speak up. (Did anyone say ‘quiet Australians’? Bugger that.) Which brings me back to the awesomeness of our dear old/new Shed: aka action central. We’re seeing stuff happen in countless ways. Cop this:

• The local gym (Soul Fit). Shut down at a commercial location, the members moved into the Shed (in a week!) and opened a community-owned health centre. Cop that! Listen to the story that featured on local radio here. (skip to 1hr52mins) .

• Mikkeline from All Things Aroha. A new Shed business being supported by two other tenants (Alice from Sunshine Organic Miso and Maya from Myk’s) providing equipment, knowledge around bottling and labelling.

• Five new members of the Board: Peter Griffin (as Chair), Ryan Rathborne, Alison McDonald, Gaala Watson and Greg Hamilton. All stepping up to take on substantial tasks.

And that’s just to name a few!

I could go on but it’s hard to write with an 80s mixed tape blaring in the background and my babe and daughter dancing around the loungeroom (I think it’s that old Tracy Chapman classic … talkin’ about a … revolution was it?). Anyway, I’m sure you have your own examples. Actually, you, dear Careholder, are an example.

Yes Tracy, you’re right. There’s a quiet revolution going on. It starts small but before you know it is more popular than Trent Dalton at a feminist book club. I’ll leave it to the words of your countryperson, novelist Wendell Berry, to end this month’s rant:

“The real work of planet saving will be small, humble, and humbling … Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.”

And that, friends, is what the Shed stands for – and what true leadership is.

Shed up!
Rob

Engaging Community

Community engagement. What is it? How do you do it? What comes from it? These are the questions many of our investors have been pondering over the course of our campaign, and for some, their whole careers are based on this very thing called ‘community engagement’. Local councils battle with it, property developers struggle to embrace it, even the community itself often finds it difficult to articulate this thing called community engagement. When to start, when to end, how often, where and who, etc.?

At Food Connect, we’ve always placed community at the heart of our business model. It makes doing business a bit more cumbersome and slow, however, the long term rewards have proven that a business that is deeply embedded in its community tends to last the test of time.

We’ve never really had a formula for doing this. We’ve just encouraged staff, farmers and customers to come up with ideas and, where resources and time allow, test them out. Some ideas fail. Some ideas take off and are still in use today. The point is, giving it a go and not placing too much emphasis on the outcome because it’s the PROCESS that provides the juice – the connections, conversations, heartache and challenges. Being human – the whole spectrum of being human – and providing a safe space for that to happen – has been the biggest reward.

Now, you can put this in a framework, and local community group, Imagine Moorooka are doing just that. Last weekend we donated the warehouse space for a group of nearly 30 locals to participate in the Bank of Ideas workshop, Asset Based Community Development, presented by Californian-based expert, Ron Dwyer Voss. Here’s an interview by Paul Bishop on the day. Listen to his answer to the question of how to scale community action in the era of the anthropocene (at around the 6 min mark).

Food Connect Shed – by the community, for the community

It’s a cloudless day in sunny Salisbury. The roller doors on the warehouse at 8 Textile Crescent are hanging around the halfway mark. A light breeze rolls in under the awning, teasing the team sitting inside. The position of the door has become a point of contention, with attempts to let the full breeze through blocked due to street noise from the small industrial precinct.The warehouse staff are winding down from a full packing day. Fresh local farm produce arrives in the early hours, and a packing line of staff assemble it into individual and wholesale orders. Seasonal food from farms in the local area is aggregated, reducing food miles from an average of 1,500km in large supermarkets to just 150km.“Local food is the way of the future – connecting farmers to consumers in close proximity to reduce the effects of climate change, improve prices for farmers, and provide good quality affordable food for community”  says Emma-Kate, co-founder of the three Food Connect organisations.Emma-Kate is sitting at a long dining room table at the end of the pack line. You can sense her bone tiredness, and it’s not immediately clear if that is from her decade long work in the Fair Food movement, or the current equity crowdfunding campaign she is undertaking aiming to raise an almost audacious $2 million.Three months ago, Emma-Kate Rose along with her partner in life, Robert Pekin, set up their third organisation: the Food Connect Shed. Their goal?“To buy our warehouse. We believe that in order to fix our broken food system, the infrastructure needs to be owned by the public.”And not just the general public: the local community. People that are passionate about the future of our food system. And more specifically: women.“As women are often the primary shoppers for families, we believe they should have a stake in the production and distribution of the food they are choosing to buy for their families. Sadly women are not as represented in investment decisions. Research shows when one woman benefits, a whole community benefits” says Emma-Kate.Last year, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary announced “feminism” was one of the most looked up words online. In a world where feminism is starting to mainstream again, there are still startling statistics around women’s ownership in property, and the rates of funds available on retirement.

Figures published in the latest edition of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) study show rates of home ownership among women have fallen 13 per cent since 2002, with those aged 35-39 responsible for the biggest drop, from 66.8 per cent to 48.2 per cent over the past 16 years.“We want to provide women an easy opportunity to invest in property. Because I’ve personally rebuilt myself financially after a divorce, and my mother had a similar experience after my father died at a young age, so I know what starting fully again feels like. So far, over 75% of investors in our campaign are women.”Emma-Kate met Robert in 2007 at a Climate Change conference. A whirlwind romance turned into her coming on board his nascent social enterprise, Food Connect, eventually as his General Manager. In the past thirteen years, Food Connect has won environmental awards, recognised for its ethical governance and trading practices, all while paying ecological farmers a fair price, shortening food miles, paying workers fairly and incubating small food businesses out of their commercial kitchen. All up they’ve contributed over $25 million to their local economy.Their first lease was effectively crowdfunded from their early customers.

“Our supporters pre-bought veggies, so we could move into our first space. That was the first time we realised the true value of our crowd in the movement we were building” says Robert, Food Connect’s original co-founder.

Robert has been one of the leaders in the Fair Food Movement in Australia, pushing for fairer wages for farmers and more transparency for consumers. This led the Food Connect team to launch Food Connect Foundation, to support their advocacy and research.

“It feels like we’re at the beginning of a new stage of what local means, and how we value people and the planet. There’s still a way to go, but we have to try every intervention we can to solve some of the world’s biggest problems: food, climate change, and social inclusion” says Robert.

One tactic that has proven itself overseas is community owned infrastructure. In Scotland, arguably one of the leaders in the social enterprise movement, community owned infrastructure has become a cornerstone tenet to their democratising of capital. Community Ownership in Scotland is increasing. Currently 2.9% of Scottish land is owned by the community, with aims of 1 million acres being held by the community by 2020. The Community Shares movement is a structure that supports everything from community owned Hydro Electric scheme on the Isle of Mull through to a greengrocer in Edinburgh.

Closer to home, there are a few examples in Australia: Hepburn Wind being the most notable, and the Yackandanda Petrol Station where 16 years ago the local petrol station announced they were closing. A co-operative was set up to buy the station, and now over 600 locals own shares.

Food Connect Shed’s constitution has specified recognition of First Nations governance protocols and is being advised by local elders on appropriate engagement and ways we can work together while valuing different cultural ways of being.

“We saw what has been happening internationally with the local and fair food movements, and we knew we had to do something in Queensland. We believe Food Connect Shed is one tactic we can employ to bring about the food future we want for our children” says Emma-Kate.

“We created the Food Connect Shed because we needed a distinct entity to own the warehouse. We had articles in the existing Food Connect constitution that wouldn’t allow investment, and our foundation wasn’t the right structure either” says Emma-Kate.

The Food Connect Shed was officially formed as a public unlisted company just two days before their equity crowdfunding campaign launched. While the concept had been in the works for longer, it was the first that their community heard about this new Food Connect initiative.

“We had to move fast with the opportunity. Our landlord was willing to sell, and we saw the power in owning this infrastructure both as a community – but also as a group that believes things can be done differently and better” says Emma-Kate.

The company has already raised over $1,2 million from 454 investors. It has two more days to go, and is seeking out investors that want to be part of their mission as well as owning a piece of property in sought after industrial space in Salisbury, on the southside of Brisbane.

“It’s not over til it’s over! We really believe that we can do this, in our community with our community, for our community.” 

You can pledge here, and read more about the Food Connect Shed journey to date here: https://www.pledgeme.com.au/investments/2-food-connect-shed-ltd

What we’ve learned (so far) from our equity crowdfunding journey

As we near the end of the Food Connect Shed Equity Crowdfunding campaign, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the lessons we’ve learned and look back on all that we’ve achieved thus far. There’s certainly a lot to be grateful for and to reflect on.

Food Connect is a thriving business that started as a community project. We’ve been around now for 13 years and we’ve impacted our local food economy financially, socially and environmentally.

We’ve provided jobs, championed the circular economy, incubated businesses, and supported local farmers and we would have done none of that without our community. But, we realised that there was more we needed to do.

Preparing to launch the Food Connect Shed

When our landlord offered us the opportunity to buy the shed, we were incredibly excited. It’s one thing to have a supportive community behind your venture, it’s a whole other kettle of fish to have a community take ownership of a new venture and be rewarded if it is successful. We really want the entire community to benefit, not just one person (as great as Wayne is).

With community ownership comes community responsibility and a community voice. Our future is theirs and will be shaped by a shared vision. That possibility is exciting for us given so much about business in our society is about the views of the few at the expense of the many.

We received a grant from a women’s giving circle to prepare for our investment raise and got the green light from our landlord, so it was on! We then spent a good eight weeks preparing for the campaign – the first of its kind to launch in Queensland. We were the guinea pigs in a giant experiment it seemed.

The journey has been a rollercoaster ride– dizzying, exhilarating, scary and sometimes exhausting. Here are a few of the takeaways from the past few weeks:

Activating your crowd is everything

We are lucky to have an incredibly engaged community and for over 13 years, we feel that we’ve been campaigning on a lot of levels for food systems change. However, we needed to spend more focused time activating our crowd of supporters on the specifics of this campaign prior to the launch.

We were so busy setting up a new company, and preparing the offer, that we didn’t spend enough time preparing our crowd.  In hindsight, the first 30 days of the campaign were really spent priming the crowd, so it was a welcome relief when the Board agreed to take advantage of the time extensions allowed under ASIC’s legislation. This has allowed us to refocus, negotiate new leases and improve the business case for investment, and further activate our crowd.

Being first can be a blessing and a curse

Equity crowdfunding is new in Australia and, as I said, we were the first to do a campaign in Queensland. In hindsight, there is much to be learned from being the pioneers. I’m sure other campaigns will greatly benefit from our experience. What we discovered is that there needs to be more education around a campaign when it’s an equity crowdfunding campaign. Investors, both established and new, are also new to this form of investment and the legislation is fresh off the press. There is a lot to take in and understand.

Aussies like a fair go but don’t like to take risks

When it comes to investments, Aussies are fairly conservative punters. We don’t like to take unnecessary risks. It could be the economic climate we’re in or it could just be culture. My guess is it’s a combination of the two.

To get a clear understanding of the motivations of this mindset would take too long to analyse, however, we do know that Australians value property as secure bet, over and above the dot com alternative investments out there. So what’s holding them back, when this is a property, in scarce industrial supply so close to the city?

My guess it’s not so much the property that’s the issue, it’s co-investing with a bunch of people you don’t know. But what we forget is that’s exactly what we’re doing with our Superannuation funds. Our fund managers just co-invest our super on behalf of thousands of other people like you and me. It’s just that we never get to meet those people in that context or have to trade shares with them face to face or in close proximity. The Food Connect Shed will mean a few hundred, perhaps a thousand people will need to make collective decisions about this place as a community – and we’re not traditionally good at that. It feels a bit uncomfortable or hard work or risky. Relationships, hey?

And that is the challenge I’m most looking forward to, because when all is said and done, we have all the solutions to address most of society’s problems right there, right now. What we don’t have is a way to collaborate that guarantees harmony and productivity at all times. That’s where the rubber hits the road and may cause some hesitation among potential investors.

Be clear on what’s for sale

Sometimes, it’s hard to get across exactly what investors are buying. In this case, a company that plans to buy a warehouse! Some of our crowd got confused that they were buying into the social enterprise Food Connect Pty Ltd, and not certain what they would get out of it, when really, this was a new company.

It’s a new company because to create a community-owned local food hub, we needed the entity to stand alone from the social enterprise and the not-for-profit, Food Connect Foundation. The new company would own the infrastructure that belonged to the food hub and rent out space to long term tenants and hire out venue and meeting areas to the public. Once this was made clear, we could define the perks that we could offer investors. Here’s a video we made to explain what investors will get if they pledge.

With equity crowdfunding legislation being so new to Australians, there was also a lot of confusion that the pledges were actually donations with a reward attached. This confusion comes from using the term ‘crowdfunding’ which is well known in Australia in terms of kickstarting a venture without an ownership stake. Equity crowdfunding actually means that you get real shares in a real company, meaning in this case you become a real property investor. So there was an additional education piece around that issue.

We could’ve chosen a more traditional path for investment, it’s true. However, our vision for a democratised food system requires us to find ways to share the risks and rewards with our community. Having the building owned by another wealthy landlord, would only mean perpetuating the dominant paradigm of the concentration of ownership, profits and power into the hands of a few. On the other side of the coin, convincing wealthy individuals to participate in a community-owned and shared project, required equally difficult conversations. The setting up of the Foundation Share – which holds voting rights over major decisions relating to the principles of the vision – was a barrier for some who normally see property as a commodity to be speculated on the market.

And, while some of these lessons have been hard, they’ve made us stronger and clearer.

It’s not over till…

Over the last couple of weeks of the campaign, we’re going grassroots and pulling in our team, friends, family and city cousins to make this dream a reality. We’re still in this 100 per cent. Why? Because we believe our future food system (and our kids and their kids) needs it. The climate change emergency means we need to organise our communities in totally different ways to meet the challenges ahead. The Food Connect Shed aims to do this and provide a prosperous and welcoming place in the process.

Are you in? We’d love you to join us on this exciting journey. Pledge today to get us over the line! If you’ve already pledged, it would be awesome if you shared this post.

Celebrate with us!

We’re hosting another market on the last day of our campaign! More incredible makers, hot food, local produce, talks, Buchi Kombucha, Ballistic Beer and wine.

Don’t miss the markets this Saturday afternoon, November 10th from 3pm!

Attend one of the many tours of the Shed, and pledge to secure the Shed for future community events! Details here.

Robert Forster in the Shed

If markets aren’t your thing, come and join us afterwards for an intimate concert with former Go-Betweens icon, Robert Forster. Tickets here.

New Perk for Investors Announced!

We’ve refreshed our campaign plan and have an exciting new perk to offer all of our pledgers. When we buy the building with you all, we’ll be setting up a retail shop where customers can access the freshest produce from our local farmers and many additional lines of locally made, ethically-sourced products.

As a careholder in the Food Connect Shed, you’ll be eligible for a discount on everything in the retail shop. Here’s how it will work:

Pledges from $500 – $999 = 5% discount

Pledges from $1,000 to $4,999 = 7.5% discount

Pledges from $5,000 to $10,000 = 10% discount

This is in addition to discounts on venue hire for events and meetings. So now there’s even more reason to become an investor in our local food hub!

What’s in it for me?

Here’s a quick summary of the benefits of investing with us.

The Food Connect Shed is a brand new company, raising funds to buy the warehouse in which social enterprise, Food Connect has been renting for over a decade.

We want to create Australia’s first community-owned local food hub. Help us make our big vision happen by pledging today at https://www.pledgeme.com.au/investm…/2-food-connect-shed-ltd