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Assessment Report on the Impact of the Eastern Ontario Local Food Conference
This report, authored by Peter Andrée and Omar Elsharkawy at Carleton University, is based on a literature review, a scan of key documents, and interviews with organizers and experts. It provides recommendations on how to track medium-term impacts of the Eastern Ontario Local Food Conference on participants, their businesses, and their organizations.
The report is in part the result of a 2016–17 honours research project by Omar Elsharkawy, who worked with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) to develop a new evaluation tool for measuring the impact of the annual Local Food conference. Working closely with Peter Andrée and Katie Nolan, the OMAFRA agriculture and rural economic development advisor, Omar conducted a series of in-depth interviews with local food experts, conference organizers, and past EOLFC participants. His goal was to better understand the full range of impacts a conference like this can have on participants. The evaluation tools used by conference organizers in the past tended to focus narrowly on a few specific metrics, like the number of ‘retained or newly created jobs’ that resulted from working with information gleaned at the conference. These tools yielded limited useful data, since it is often difficult to trace the creation of a specific job to a session an entrepreneur may have attended at a conference.
The research team drew on Sustainable Livelihood Theory, an approach typically used for evaluating development projects in the Global South. Sustainable Livelihood Theory holds that a broad range of social, financial, and cultural assets are required for farmers and other food system actors to thrive. The outcome of Omar’s research is a more holistic, open-ended, approach to local food conference evaluation.
