The conditions for a healthy, equitable and resilient food system are shaped in multiple places. This includes federal agricultural policy and state planning rules to city-wide infrastructure investment and the choices made on a single street corner. No single intervention is sufficient.
The challenges, and the opportunities, are often upstream of what any one community or organisation can shift alone. Our response is a multi-scale portfolio: a connected set of initiatives, projects and partnerships that operates simultaneously at the national, city and neighbourhood level.
Greater Melbourne's food system is shaped by actions and decisions made at the neighbourhood, city and national scale. And so changing it requires working coherently across each of these scales. Hence, our multi-scale portfolio is a connected set of initiatives, projects and partnerships that work to enable neighbourhood scale change, act across the city context and influence national scale change. Working in this way unlocks new possibilities at each of the scales. Local demonstrations build the evidence for policy change. National policy change opens new conditions for local action to flourish. Together, they create the momentum a network of local food economies to emerge.
The neighbourhood is where food is grown, sold, shared and experienced, where a local market becomes a weekly ritual, a community garden becomes a gathering place, and a greengrocer becomes part of the fabric of a street. Our portfolio approach works to shift the enabling conditions for neighbourhood action. We work to support demonstrations of how people, businesses, growers and organisations are already building local food economies.
The city scale is where we act. Melbourne's planning system, procurement decisions, infrastructure investment and economic development all shape whether a local food economy can take root and thrive. We work at this level to build the connective infrastructure that local food systems need. Things like city wide infrastructure of our public markets, neighbourhood houses, wholesaler hubs and importantly the stories we tell of our food identity here as a city.
National conditions enable or disable local food economies. The potential of local food economies is entangled in agricultural subsidies, trade policy, supermarket regulation, institutional procurement and competition law. Our portfolio seeks to influence and advocate for the systemic shifts that would enable a network of local food economies in Greater Melbourne. We work alongside national partners, policy advocates and food system reformers to make the case for a food economy that prioritises resilience, nourishment, equity and ecological health.
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