The Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) is inviting applications for the Conscious Food Incubator to support the experimentation of innovative approaches to transform food systems through the cultivation of inner capacities, to scale up and accelerate progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA), convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration. The vision of the Alliance is anchored in the realization that they have the science, technical capacity, and technological tools needed to transform food systems; however, these solutions are not delivering the impact needed. To understand why, they must examine the collective blind spots and look beyond the problems’ symptoms, patterns, and structures, at what fundamentally drives the systems. Consciousness and mental models are increasingly recognized as the key to unlocking systems change.
Objectives:
- The cultivation of inner capacities for regenerative food systems constitutes a new field of practice that requires testing and innovation to identify, develop and nurture potentially transformative solutions.
- The Conscious Food Incubator creates a space for collective experimentation and learning, through prototyping and testing different approaches for cultivating the inner capacities of stakeholders across food systems, which can inspire the scaling up of successful experiences. The learnings and solutions generated through the Conscious Food Incubator are intended to support people in cultivating and applying these capacities and approaches, while also embedding them in UNDP’s own ways of working, to maximize development impact towards the SDGs.
- The objectives of the Conscious Food Incubator are the following:
- To test and demonstrate how consciousness approaches can strengthen inner capacities that in turn help accelerate the transformation of food systems to make them more regenerative, sustainable, and equitable.
- To generate a set of learnings and learning resources – in the form of case studies, training materials, trainers, and partners – which can be used to scale up the integration of consciousness-based practices and strengthening of inner capacities for food systems transformation.
Eligibility Criteria:
- Eligible Entity:
- Civil society and (national or international) non-governmental organizations, including non-governmental academic or educational institutions.
- Private sector and commercial entities, and governmental organizations (e.g. regional governments, municipalities, etc.) are not eligible.
- Individuals are not eligible.
- Partnerships between eligible organizations or institutions are permitted, but a lead applicant is required. All partners must satisfy the eligibility criteria as applicable to the lead applicant.
- CoFSA Interventions criteria: the proposed intervention must meet the CoFSA Interventions criteria.
- CoFSA Principles: the proposed intervention must generally align with CoFSA Principles for Cultivating Inner Capacities.
- Application Form and Award Amount: The Applicant must apply for an Award of up to $20,000 and submit a duly completed application form.
- Applicants cannot be on the UNDP Vendor Ineligibility List.