# Food Sovereignty Hub
**Why food sovereignty hubs?**
As we try to create new patterns of living on the planet, all humans have a need for sustenance in the form of food and we need to find ways of providing for that need that also nourishes the systems around us. A food sovereignty hub may be a center of a human community. Food sovereignty can be adjacent and interacting with the market based systems that we are used to going through in order to get our food but may create commons for the communities that run them.

The impulse towards creating this kind of hub comes from reducing the friction of sourcing the kind of food that people consider good. What constitutes good food will vary from group to group and these preferences need to be configurable in any model. Some of the values that might be used to guide the work in a hub could be:
- what is in this food and how will it affect our bodies when we digest it?
- what are the conditions of the soil from the food comes and how is our production or harvesting affecting that soil?
- where is the food coming from and how well do we understand what is needed to keep this flow of sustenance towards the group going?
- what are the conditions like for the humans that are involved in the sourcing of the food?

**What might a food sovereignty hub look like?**
The most basic layer of a hub is the ability for people to coordinate the sourcing of food they want in a way that also adequately supports the people producing that food (which may or may not include people in the hub). I will use the concepts of "the group" and "the hub" interchangeably here, as a hub is not necessarily limited to a building.

Some of that sourcing may be done within the group if productive capacities are present within the hub. A hub will most likely but not always be organized around a physical location which facilitates the work that is done within the group. Collective storage of food is a common function of the hubs, as is craftbased value-adding and preservation.

If there is will and resources enough, food sovereignty hubs may also grow into centers that ensure the fertility of their surrounding systems in order to ensure vibrant ecosystems that will be able to keep providing for the members needs over time.

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## Provisioning & Production
The book [Free, Fare and Alive](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43672407-free-fair-and-alive) describes that word provisioning as a part of a commons ontology. It is a way to differentiate between remaining in an economic (transactional) space and creating a situation where something is brought in, provisioned, but after that is used in ways that are not adherent to market mechanism. One example of this would be to provision the compost in order to do a communal garden where you are not selling the vegetables to one another.

Provisioning is a useful concept in order to start exploring new ways of thinking about how needs and gifts of people in a collective can meld together and support each other without the need for monetary mediation. In addition to the provisioning that may happen through a hub, there are also, based on the places, structures and people involved often great potential to explore collective production. Community gardens are a well known and longstanding practice, but other things such as mushroom growing, fermentation, drying or hunting are ways to ensure the long term sustenance for people in the collective, in a way that may also create large amounts of learning, community and collective capacity.

## Food store and buyers club
There are lots of examples of collective spaces that are used for storing and handling food distribution. This concept focuses on the models that are only open to members of the space, and not around the models of cooperativly owned food stores open to the public which is a common pattern also.

Members would decide on whether to keep stock over time or doing just collective ordering which is devided as it is delivered into the different people placing the orders. There are many ways of doing thins, like working directly with food producers (one off purchases, reoccuring ones or "community supported agriculture" models) or groups can buy food from larger distributers which is often the case with dry goods like rice, beans, etc.

There are lots of patterns of how this is done in different ways in Sweden at [forenadeinkop.se](https://handbok.forenadeinkop.se/). The resource is in Swedish and synthesizes information from about 15 different organizations in Sweden.

### Community production
Many things can be produced at a community level and shared between all active members of the sovereignty hub. Could be on subscription or straight division between interested members. In addition to examples detailed below, other modes of production that could be explored are no-dig vegetables, hunting group alliances, commons-based fisheries.
#### Example: Microgreens
(Details of a microgreens layout here based on Mycogreens experience)

#### Example: Mushrooms
(Details of a mushroom production layout here based on Mycogreens experience)

#### Example: Fermentation & Drying
(Details of a dryingroom and a workshop setup for food enrichment and stabilization based on mycogreens experience)

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## Coordination - ***Possible Holochain modules***
A number of Holochain modules could be combined to create a deployable app for a hub.
### Inventory (+ sourcing/distribution)
Possibly using HoloREA, [base layers of Shiro](https://shirocoop.xyz/)
### Task Management and timekeeping
Supportive of members giving x amount of hours, also support for managing what tasks need to be done and how.
### Sourcing deliberation and thresholding (for orders)
Conversational space (slack/loomio) for finding and evaluating producers (defining internal ethics/choices on where to source from). Also needing availability of setting thresholds after which orders are sent to producers.
### Mutual credit (internal to group &/ asset backed)
Internal credit system by coop connected to some other currency (fiat/asset backed). For production facilities (enterprise lab section) credit systems could also be used to provide fertility (compost, food, biochar, seeds, seedlings, etc) as a backing for credit (asset backing).
### Learning & Knowledge commons
A food sovereignty hub is also both a repository and cauldron for knowledge around how humans live in their ecosystems. Many of the processes and considerations that are needed in order to live regeneratively in place need to be available as constant mutual learning. This also holds for evaluating how trade with other bioregions is to be evaluated. Courseware and accreditation may facilitate new people into a food sovereignty hub and is also crucial in allowing for the replication of these spaces.

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## Learning Enterprise Lab - Regenerative skilling
A second stage could be available for any food sovereignty hub which is to start establishing enough humans with skills and capacities to start stewarding surrounding areas into regenerative pathways and increasing the biological flows around it. This could be called a learning enterprise lab.

This will look different depending on the context for each place, but there are many skills and patterns that overlap. Some of the learning pathways that might be useful to explore have some initial documentation at the [Food Shift Media Library](https://www.notion.so/foodshift/Food-Shift-Media-Library-78e5e8cb087e4427b23af3c0ec3ec8ba)).

These progressions are conceptualized primarily from a non-urban point of view, however many of the same patterns of regeneration would be most welcome also in urban areas.

Some english rudimentary slides of an enterprise resource lab that we have been zoning for in Sweden is documented [here (working name House of Healthy Soils)](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aPJoDOXGDNFwE4k3UcER3W3CDFwS1_7cctisnVR4gdQ/edit#slide=id.g7ed6362876_0_26) The layout of how it could look on the ground can be found here at [rekobyn.se (SWEDISH)](http://www.rekobyn.se/verksamheter/). [Detailed *(Swedish)* design of the regeneration facility here](https://hackmd.io/5PbNmidgSTu__jljAL0lWQ). *Rekobyn, is an ecovillage project in Sweden that has been in development for about five years.*

Some of the core competencies that these labs may offer to the outside world include:
- Composting
- Fermentation
- Biochar
- Mushroom cultivation
- Water retention landscaping
- Perennial propagation
- Agroecology
- Algie and aquaculture

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## Cooperative Analysis
- how it fits and why that will make it work..