146 – Reflections on the CRFS Leadership Meeting 2025

Lucie: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a social impact scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. 

Hi David.

David: Hi, Lucie. Looking forward to this discussion. What are we gonna discuss?

Lucie: Your participation recently at a leadership meeting for the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems.

David: Yes.

Lucie: I would be very intrigued to know more.

David: We’ve often mentioned, but we haven’t done as much as I think we might do in the future on our work with the Global Collaborations for Resilient Food Systems, funded by the McKnight Foundation. We have the privilege to be part of the leadership team and this particular meeting…

Lucie: You have the privilege.

David: I have the privilege to be part of the leadership team. And this particular meeting was [00:01:00] really exciting because it brought together a lot of the cross-cutting projects who hadn’t actually met before that are involved in different aspects of the work, not just in the regions, which is where we work specifically. The Global Collaborations for Resilient Food Systems has a Strategy one and a Strategy two, and within Strategy one, it focuses on three regions, East Africa, West Africa, or Eastern Southern Africa, West Africa, and the Andes.

Lucie: And in each of those regions, its research projects are working to progress, let’s say, in agroecology or progress agroecology and sustainable communities. 

David: Exactly related to three or four target countries. Our particular focus has been on West Africa and we’ve done a number of episodes related to bits of this work in West Africa in the past, which has been some of the most inspirational work for me in different ways.

Lucie: Exactly. So I know you really appreciate being part of the leadership team for all of the ideas, which is really why I wanted [00:02:00] to have this podcast, ’cause I wanted to know what you’ve been discussing, what ideas are there at the moment? And I think they’re, are they annual meetings, I think these leadership meetings?

David: These leadership meetings are roughly annual. In some sense the last one happened alongside the convening in Kisumu, which I think we had an episode on of course after that convening. And there was a leadership team meeting associated to that. And that was really exciting ’cause that was one of the first leadership teams that was actually in a region.

And so this was in Kenya. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi are the Eastern Southern African region. We’ve got of course our meeting coming up for the community of practice of the West African region, which is Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali. We’ve discussed that region a bit in previous episodes. 

And the first time we’ve had this global set of partners come in as well, was a really big event and it was an experiment as it [00:03:00] was put, but it was really enriching. There were lots of different voices that I hadn’t heard before. There’s particular collaborations, which now might happen. We’ve started discussing the work of the Rafaella Foundation, who have a grant now where they’re getting involved in both Niger and Bolivia, bringing the Andes and the West African region together a little bit in an exciting way with a specific methodology and some technology. I’ve had wonderful meetings with them, actually learning about the technology they’ve built and so on.

So all of this is part of, how can I put this? It is part of this shift towards this framing of the new strategies as they have it. 

Lucie: Well, exactly, you mentioned they had strategy one, which was working within regions, but we haven’t really discussed what strategy two is. 

David: Well, we haven’t really discussed what strategy one is either, but it involves working with the regions. And one of the things I want to be slightly careful of, it’s not [00:04:00] really, I’m not best placed to articulate well strategy one and strategy two. I should probably arrange an episode with either Paul or Jane to sort of actually explain strategy one and strategy two, the program as a whole, because it really should be their voice, not mine describing that. 

But what I can speak to is the fact that actually the strategy two had a whole set of what we called cross-cutting grantees that were not specific to individual regions, and that were interested in ideas that were more global in nature. And a big part of the way the program works is this interplay between the local and the global. It’s part of what makes, in my experience, this program unique. There’s many other aspects that I appreciate. 

Lucie: I was going to say, yeah, I can think of lots of other things that you’ve mentioned previously.

David: Yeah, and one of the things that I found very interesting [00:05:00] was that actually a lot of these global partners are involved in big projects which may even have more funding than CRFS. But what I think was so interesting, and what I really took out of the meeting was that CRFS really has been over a long period of time building this thoughtful learning approach of how to actually get this interplay between global and local. 

And really, this meeting was, for me, it was inspirational because I could really see this new set of grantees that hadn’t really interacted in the regions yet, but were having influence in global forums, in global funding flows, and so on. They are relevant to what the local [00:06:00] grantees and the local communities of practice are doing. And also what’s coming outta the communities of practice is something which is valued as voices to come out into those global forums. 

This meeting that was just a few weeks ago was the first time that that interplay was very explicit within the program, and it’s really highlighting the evolution of this program into a new form.

Again, I’m not the one who’s best placed to articulate what that new form is. This is something where we really need to get Jane or Paul on a call for this. 

Lucie: And they are part of the McKnight Foundation helping manage the CRFS.

David: Absolutely. Jane is the overall director and is one of the senior program officers who has been very deeply involved in the new strategies. And so, you know, their voices would be very valuable to hear on articulating [00:07:00] this. But I’ve been involved now for over 10 years, it’s evolved so many times across that time, but really evolution rather than revolution.

And each part of that evolution, you see the power and the… well, the value that the program brings has, you know, has grown. It’s grown in maturity, it’s grown in the value it brings. 

Lucie: Yeah. And it is interesting. It’s not sort of evolution as trends come and go, it’s evolution in terms of, as the program grows, as it becomes bigger, as it becomes clearer what its own expertise is perhaps.

David: I would argue that it is a little bit as trends come and go. But it is also trendsetting in this. So it was interested in agroecology and agroecological ideas before that became [00:08:00] fashionable. And it has been influential in sort of enabling others to recognize how agroecology can be sort of mainstreamed, I think, is an interesting word for that.

And so FAO, who is arguably one of the biggest players to have really included agroecology as a core component in itself and in its structures. 

Lucie: And the FAO, sorry. 

David: Food and Agriculture Organization one of the UN entities, institution. So this is agroecology institutionalized in interesting ways. 

What I would argue is that it is certainly not the case that this has come out of the McKnight program. But the McKnight program has funded FAO, they have had grants now, they were one of the people, one of the organizations present as a cross cutting grantee member. [00:09:00] And those grants have, in some sense bridged between the work FAO is doing on this and influenced that work and brought the influence of what FAO is doing on this into the program.

And this is where this evolution is really coming from. That as the landscape is changing there is adaptation to that in all sorts of ways. But it is not about being, just sort of blowing in the wind as to where things are going. It is, as you described it, about actually, as a program, understanding itself, its role, its influence, and actually growing into that influence, which is so interesting now, which is what’s happened very recently. 

Lucie: Okay. So you were very aware of that sort of growing difference within the foundation and within this program at this recent meeting.

David: Absolutely. And one of the quotes, if you want, to take out of this was that someone mentioned that the [00:10:00] extended family that came together from the different grantees who are part of this was, it was like finding extended family because although as a program, it’s actually well sized with the three regions and so on, there’s a lot of cross-learning, there’s a lot of sharing of knowledge, each group, each region has its representatives and there’s real sharing across the different regions. 

But that group has been together in different forms with people coming and going, but broadly in common forms, much longer than I’ve been involved, and I’ve been involved for over 10 years. And with that longevity, actually suddenly finding a whole, we had almost twice as many people as we would normally have had with the other cross-cutting grants. And the quote was, it was like finding the sort of the lost [00:11:00] cousins. 

Lucie: So normally in the leadership meetings, it’s only the three regions? 

David: So the three regions plus the core group, if you want, who’s in Minnesota as part of the McKnight Foundation. So the McKnight Foundation are leading this. There’s then regional representatives, liaison scientists, the research method support, and a few key cross-cutting grants related to soils and agroecology. You know, that’s the leadership team as a whole, and people related to the farmer research networks. 

So, you know, there’s a sort of core group, which, as I say, I’m a young member at 10 years old, within the leadership group, and I feel very privileged to be part of this and part of the discussions. And yet that longevity, having now this sort of wider community that are involved and that are engaged, you know, interacting.

Lucie: Sorry, I’m not exactly clear if this wider [00:12:00] community of members who are already… 

David: They’re all grantees. This is the key. They are mostly grantees. The new people were grantees who were part of the crosscutting, many of them related to this new strategy two. The strategy two, instead of looking to support agroecological research in the regions and growing evidence for agroecology, food systems, and the specific regions. The strategy two is much more about global influence, influencing global funding streams. 

This is where, as we mentioned, FAO as an organization integrating agroecology into its work, they have been a grantee for specific pieces of work, which then leverage the agroecology work within FAO together with the work that’s been going on in CRFS. And that is one example, but there are many others where [00:13:00] small grants have been given to different organizations. The Agroecology Fund is another example, which I can speak to a little bit because very recently, Manor House, on behalf of the Agroecology Hub, which we have been involved with and had sort of previous episodes discussing

Lucie: In Kenya.

David: in Kenya, they received an Agroecology Fund grant to be able to extend the work which had been started on CRFS.

Well, the Agroecology Fund is a grantee of McKnight as well, and so, there’s now that influence in some sense, there’s funding going to the Agroecology Fund so they can re-grant. And the Agroecology Fund has a very different set of mechanisms. They only fund collaborations.

So the reason the Agroecology Hub got funding from them is because it’s a collaboration of agroecological partners working [00:14:00] together, furthering agroecology in certain ways. And in that specific case it’s about doing this work together, these common activities. That’s what they were funding. Enabling these partners to work together on common activities.

And that’s what the Agroecology Fund, that’s part of what it does. It really tries to strengthen these collaborations, these collaborative initiatives, bringing together partners for agroecology. 

Lucie: Let’s go back to the meeting. 

David: Let’s go back to the meeting. Well, I agree, I have deviated, but I deviated with a reason. This is to give a highlight of a few of the other people in the room who represent, each of them was a grantee of McKnight as part of the strategy of furthering agroecology in the global space. 

Lucie: Yeah. 

David: And I think these interactions between the global space and the partners in the region, like Manor House, [00:15:00] now it is exactly this idea of building those synergies, but having those synergies built not at the grassroots level. So the AE Hub receiving an Agroecology Fund grant, that’s a grassroots level initiative. They got that because it’s a grassroots organization doing good Agroecology work, and as a collaborative process, they fit in with what Agroecology Fund funds. 

But it’s also the fact that now the sort of funding level and the discussions were happening about, well, should we be doing, how should we be making sure that we’re supporting grassroots. So you are actually having that sort of, those high level discussions, as well as the grassroots initiatives, and you’re trying to support and balance these. And this space was a very interesting space. 

It, of course, was not about, well, it was about, I should say concretely, CRFS. It was about the Global Collaboration for Resilient [00:16:00] Food Systems. It was not about a bigger meeting of agroecology and pushing agroecology as an agenda together. Because it’s already, it’s smaller than that, but it was at this level of the strategic. So there are actors in this who are doing policy at the UN level, at the national levels, and who are pushing that. And there were people who were doing grassroots work. And it was really about bringing together these different experiences and people, and having discussions and having connections built.

We’ve got a couple of collaborations which are very concrete, which are maybe coming out of this in specific ways. But there’s all sorts of other connections that other people have made from this. Because by recognizing that what CRFS is able to do is, part of its role is to leverage the connections between the people [00:17:00] that it’s funding so that they are more powerful together than just the work that they do.

And this is what was so interesting to see happen. It’s the first time that part of this has come together with the global and the regional components. My expectation is this will not be the last. So this is something where I believe that the experiment from my perspective, and I think for many others, it was a great success. 

Lucie: Exactly. So I’m interested to know what, you know, we have the research method support grant or one half of it, and so I’m interested to know, did you have any learnings? Or what does our role, what does it mean for our role as research method support to these changes?

David: Well, the big thing which we were already doing, and this is the thing that it is not a big change. None of these meetings are ever revolution. It’s all about evolution. [00:18:00] We were already as we’ve discussed before having these internship programs, the apprenticeships, the junior fellowships, building capacity in the region, trying to build up the local capacity and have them interacting with us at the sort of global level and support out, having the local global with us, representing the global and with our partners on the ground and the team we have on the ground, being the local.

Interestingly, in this context, I was representing more the local, because I have the local knowledge. And so it’s really about different bridges, building those bridges. And part of what was discussed was that actually there would be interesting opportunities to sort of extend it a little bit more. There were a few grantees present who were part of the real local work. 

Lucie: Oh, how interesting.

David: Just very few, none from the West African region unfortunately. 

Lucie: Oh, that’s a shame.

David: But for me, Andes, there were a [00:19:00] couple, and from the Eastern Southern Africa, there was one or two. And it was recognized that those voices were really powerful, and that actually in the future you don’t want to swamp it out because it becomes unwieldy, but you do want a few more such voices. So my expectation or my hope is in a future iteration, we might have a couple of the West African grantees there representing the region. 

We did have, of course, representatives, Batamaka, Samake, and of course the liaison scientist, Bettina, were all there representing the region formally with myself as the research methods support. 

Lucie: And they tend to have strong voices. 

David: All three of them have strong voices in different ways. Bettina is naturally, it seems soft, but it comes through. 

Lucie: Very much so. It’s impressive. 

David: When she speaks, others listen. It’s really wonderful. And so they really represent the West African region or we represent the West African region because [00:20:00] I’m part of the West African voice there. And what I hope may happen in the future is a similar meeting may happen where we get a few more grantees. 

The person I would’ve loved to have in the room this last week was Baoua from Sahel IPM, because I feel that he is really engaging, he has grown a project from an entomology project studying a pest, a millet head miner, sorry, a parasitoid of millet head miner, and looking at biological control to now having this incredible apparatus with people in three countries studying a whole range of biological controls, pesticide, you know, biological pesticides, neem and many others, and really a huge research apparatus, but accompanied with partners in farmer federations. 

So he now really has this amazing network, [00:21:00] which has built around his work, and he speaks very articulately about this in a way that I think would’ve been extremely powerful to others in the room at that particular meeting. And so I think he would’ve been a voice. I’d have loved to hear. 

Lucie: Really interesting. 

David: And that there’s others, of course. But that’s a very concrete example. And maybe another reflection to just come out for me personally was, I really appreciate it, being able to be part of and observe this evolution of the program itself. 

Lucie: We have noticed in you talking about as an introduction to it, I think that came through very clearly.

David: Well, when the idea of the strategy one and strategy two was introduced, there were questions about, you know, is this the right way to evolve? Is this the right way to shift? And so on. And that’s been discussed now for [00:22:00] four, five years. There’s been these sort of discussions as we’re growing into it. And this was the meeting where suddenly for many people it made sense. And I think you could see the shift within the leadership team where people who before had been maybe reticent about some of this division, or worried about what this would mean for the program, suddenly seeing the added value that having, and broadly it is bringing in this global voice, this idea of having these influencers at a high level, really connecting to what is happening within the program.

There was a criticism, which was an auto criticism, I would feel, from within the program that we were too insular, that we were doing good work, but nobody knew what we were doing and we weren’t influencing what others are doing. And I think this element that now that visibility is increasing and elements [00:23:00] of this are being taken by different people. 

I posed a challenge, which I feel is really central, that in a number of the discussions I had with some of the external people, the complexity of the CRFS program with leadership, with the staff within McKnight who are the program direction, if you want, the regional teams, the cross-cutting teams like ourselves and soils and agroecology, and FRN, and all these components alongside the grantees. Many from the outside look at this and they don’t understand the complexity and they don’t understand the value of the complexity. 

And there were some instances during the week where for me it was [00:24:00] really beautiful that actually confronted to what others were bringing in, that complexity of the program, the value of it really came out strongly. And I’d like to just maybe take one example from the Andes, which I hadn’t heard about before, and the full details of it don’t matter. But the basic premise was that there was a research grant working with a local partner, and the communication between them for whatever reasons, broke down and that community decided or was no longer part of the research they were doing. You know, if they were going to do something, they didn’t want to do that research because that research was actually, it was about zero pesticide use and they hadn’t realized that some of the things they were using counted as pesticide and they didn’t want to stop using those.

[00:25:00] These were chemical pesticides that they didn’t consider as pesticides. So they were happy with the idea of zero pesticide use, but they didn’t want to stop using the pesticides that they didn’t consider as pesticides. My understanding, very limited, I just heard the story. And so, that community sort of stepped back from being part of that project. And what was so fascinating to hear is actually them stepping back from the project was something which, if you think about traditional monitoring and evaluation, this is a failure. This is some of the things which didn’t happen, which you’d written into your grant proposal would happen. And so then things needed to change and adapt. 

And that changing adapting happened with the regional team in collaboration with them, talking with them, and the regional team then decided, well, we should go and talk to this community that was strong enough in their views and in their, what they want to do, that they were happy to turn down funding because it didn’t align with what they [00:26:00] wanted to do.

So maybe we should approach them to see what is it you want to do. And this is where that human connection was then made between the regional team and that community that had stepped down from this other project. And the fact that this, the personal relationships are so strong meant that this could happen in a way, which was very positive.

And it’s taken about two years of discussion because it’s a research program, it’s not a development program. And so to discuss with that community. Well, if you’re not interested in being part of that research, are there other things you’re interested in doing? Are there other researchers you’d like to work with to be able to understand what’s needed in your community? 

And they’ve been discussing this for a couple of years and they are getting to something where there’s now a proposal which is going to go in related to that. And what this highlighted to me, and which I believe, and this is just an example, I can talk to many others [00:27:00] within our regions in West Africa or even in East Africa, where similar evolutions have happened with dynamics in the region, supported by the fact that it’s not just the grantees, it’s the grantees with the regional team, with the leadership team and it’s the interactions between them and the tensions between them.

I can give instances of where between a grantee and the regional team, there was tension and there was feeling that the grantee wasn’t developing, but the leadership team said, no, this is a really strategic partner in other ways, and indeed over time they evolved into something else. I can give all sorts of other examples where the complexity of the power dynamics and structures, which are, from the outside unnecessarily complex. Why don’t you just trim this down to make it minimal, where actually even our roles as support for the research methods, some of the soft things that we’ve helped, [00:28:00] which otherwise without which certain grantees may not still be or may not have been able to deliver?

Simple example we have from fairly recently is just report writing. There was a grantee who hadn’t submitted their reports and we were able to go in with our colleagues on the ground, our team on the ground who went in and help them to author their reports and to get them to submit them to the foundation so that they could actually keep the funding. You know, simpler things like this where it enables the grantees to be more diverse, which is what we see within CRFS, this wide diversity of different grantees, of different people working together. 

And so that aspect, there is something very powerful about it, which I feel and I felt for a long time, which in this meeting I feel was articulated better than I’ve ever heard it before. And so the challenge I gave in some sense was, [00:29:00] you know, how can we communicate this more widely? Is this something that we need to write up, communicate? I don’t have the skills to do that. I don’t even think I have all the knowledge on this. 

Lucie: But if I’m correct in saying too, that sort of same issue of how to communicate the complexity of the program is also something that within IDEMS we’re trying to work out. So it’s an interesting parallel perhaps.

David: Well, and it’s not by chance, of course. As IDEMS, I have taken a lot of inspiration, you know, as a director of IDEMS, Jane as a director of the CRFS program is one of my real inspirations, the way she has managed that complexity, and managed is an interesting word because I often see managed as being hands-on, whereas the management approach that she has of that complexity has been really inspirational to watch because it [00:30:00] isn’t hands on, but it is giving direction. It’s guiding.

Lucie: I recognize a bit. Yeah. I recognize the similarity between you both there [laughs].

David: People skills don’t come naturally to me. I learn them, I observe them in others and try to repeat. So that’s it. So this is something where I have immense admiration for how this program has evolved, has been enabled to evolve. And I think this is the key point. It’s not just allowed to evolve. It’s enabled to evolve. 

The structures in place may seem ad hoc or complex or whatever, but they are enabling. And it is about creating that enabling, and trusting that within that enabling with good choices, with hard choices. I mean, I’ve seen really hard choices being made. They went from four regions down to three at one point. And that was a unthinkable change. But they did it with amazing [00:31:00] skill and grace, and the way that they did it was just, was so powerful. They’ve made really hard choices, but they’ve done it in such a way that the evolution has always been enabling for those within it in different ways. 

Lucie: That sounds like a nice place to finish the discussion.

David: Well, thank you for this. I’ve enjoyed immensely. I’m sorry I’ve gone on a bit, but it is a topic, I’ve just come out of this meeting, I’m always inspired by these meetings. They are some of the most intellectually stimulating environments I’ve ever found myself in.

Lucie: Excellent. Well, we’ll look forward to more episodes on your reflections of meetings within the CRFS, different kinds of meetings.

David: Thanks. Well, our next meeting is in Burkina with the community of practice there. 

Lucie: Yeah. 

David: So we look forward to that meeting in a few weeks time. 

Lucie: Coming up soon. Thank you David, then thank you for your time. [00:32:00]