To create the space to host and facilitate the community of practice with our members, the WorldFMC Academy has been hard at work.
Written by Dr. J. Robin Moon, Head of Strategy of the WorldFMC
As we all knew and predicted, being together physically and interacting with one another in person was magical. We have the same language issues even when we are in the same room, and we have the same cultural differences in person. But in person, we can lay our eyes on each other, and we can be seen. We use all of our senses and non-verbal communication to be in our community – to see, hear, touch, and feel each other’s joy, passion, and humanity. The GA 2024 was the time to confirm again that we belong to this community of practice. Thank you so much for being in our world.
To create the space to host and facilitate the community of practice with our members, the WorldFMC Academy has been hard at work. We have been producing monthly Studios for about a year and a half by now. We have a series of Mini-Course recordings on our Academy platform. We have formed Regional Affinity Group as the first “identity-based” Co-Lab, and we started our first “topic-based” Co-Labs. We have started collecting your best-practice resources to create our own members-only Library.
Externally, we have been trailblazing our way to collaborate with our global partners such as the UN-FAO, CIHEAM-Bari, ICLEI, and the EU, and working hard to form more new ones. The work includes establishing a new set of methodologies to study and evaluate the impact of farmers markets, creating a learning management system and content to spread our know-how of training, building human and system capacity to cultivate farmers markets and farmers markets networks, providing technical assistance to diverse partners, and creating communications campaign and publicity to expand global farmers markets community. Our goal is to not only succeed in all of this work, but also to use these opportunities to build our Academy further to share and spread the learning with you. Even further, when the time is right, we will involve our members in such opportunities.
In the upcoming months, the WorldFMC Academy will not only continue with our monthly Studios that are open to the world but also do the following:
1. Continuing from the live social media workshop, we will start designing and bringing various members-only, virtual workshop series to you. Social media training will be the first one, and there will be others!
2. Sibling Markets (formerly known as Sister Markets) will be formed based on your speed-dating feedback (submit your forms to us!), and we will facilitate Siblings engagement!
3. We will start to share with you the progress, success, and lessons learned from our global collaborative work with other.
4. We will continue fostering the existing Co-Labs, and share with all of you how they are going!
5. We will record and upload new Mini-Course series onto our platform.
Keep your GA 2024 evaluation and speed-dating submissions coming! We are grateful for every one of you. Please stay in touch, watch us as we move, and walk with us.
