Introducing FeedBack Nashville

On any given day, when you open a local newspaper or magazine, you’re likely to find a story about Nashville’s rapid changes and persistent challenges. From promises of a reimagined public transit system to demands for more affordable housing, we are well-aware that we have a long way to go before our city reaches its full potential as a vibrant place where all residents can thrive. 

But, what about food in our city? Everyone in our city eats, yet the challenges to food security are stubbornly persistent in specific communities for all-too-familiar reasons. Obstacles to achieving community food security in Nashville are the symptoms of deeper, systemic issues that go unaddressed as we seek to confront the challenges of hunger in the present.  At FeedBack Nashville, we want to bring people together more often, and more intentionally, to imagine how we might actually create a sustainable and just local food system for everyone. This food system would provide food security and food access for all, limit our food waste and environmental harm, and strengthen our local food and agricultural economy.

FeedBack Nashville is focused on building a better food future for Nashville. We will do this by understanding our current food system, co-creating visions of a better food future, and developing opportunities to help us bring that future to reality.

Envisioned by a network of partner organizations, FeedBack Nashville is a new effort to bring food to the forefront of action in our city. The initiative strives to understant the opportunities and limitations of Nashville’s current food system, and to identify opportunities to build a better food future for all Nashville residents. The initiative received its first round of funding support from Metro Nashville’s American Relief Plan Act Funds in May 2023. The first phase of the project focuses on three goals:

• Understand Nashville’s current food system, including issues related to food access, land access, food waste, and local agricultural production

• Create a shared vision for a future Nashville food system that is just and sustainable for everyone, from farmers to consumers

• Identify opportunities that will help bring forth the changes we need and want to see in our food system in the short and long-term

FeedBack Nashville’s approach to achieving these goals is twofold: it aims to center community perspectives and disrupt the existing system that perpetuates persistent issues. FeedBack Nashville uses these two approaches because challenges like hunger in our city are complex and require each of us to understand how our unique relationships, behaviors, and experiences may be used to support meaningful, lasting change.

Changing our current food system is no easy task. Challenges like hunger and food waste are complex. Many different solutions and lots of collaboration are needed to resolve these challenges.

As a community-based project, FBN centers perspectives and lived experiences of community members. This is because community members who are most affected by food challenges possess knowledge and ideas about how we may change the food system so that it is more equitable for everyone. By engaging residents and collaborating with specific communities to design solutions for the future, we are more likely to achieve lasting change. 

As a systems change initiative, FeedBack Nashville moves our city beyond emergency response solutions to hunger and food access. Systems change approaches position us to better understand how different social, economic, and environmental circumstances interact to create hunger and other food-related challenges. They bring together individuals and organizations from the grassroots to the government to design creative solutions, from policy changes to mindset shifts. 

FeedBack Nashville offers a timely and meaningful opportunity for all of us within Nashville to collaborate to build an alternative food future for Nashville that is just and sustainable for everyone. We hope you’ll join us on this journey!

Stay tuned for our next FeedBack Nashville blog post, which will introduce the Steering Committee and Forum for the Future, and provide more information on how you can support the effort within your community!