Our Annual General Meeting and Some Lessons on Advocacy

The 2013 AGM

About 70 keen Food Secure Canada members crammed into the upstairs of Santropol Roulant for our AGM on November 27, which had an ambitious agenda with some pretty big changes for Food Secure Canada.

New Bylaws

The most important change was the unanimous adoption our new bylaws!  This document, painstakingly drafted, debated, put out for consultation and re-drafted by our hard-working Governance Committee over the past 18 months brings us into compliance with the new Canadian Not for Profits Corporations Act.  The changes also reflect our evolution, since 2001, from a volunteer network into a staffed and funded non-profit organization with a mandate for national level advocacy.

Things to note in the new bylaws:

• A Board of Directors replaces the Steering committee
• All members retain the right to vote, and the rights of organizational and individual members remain the same (see Matrix). 
• Private sector organizations that share FSC values can now be members.
• People can also become supporters or associates if membership is not appropriate (for privacy or other concerns)
• Consensus decision making is maintained
• Provisions are made for electronic meetings when facilities exist

Our new Board of Directors

Steering Committee Vice Chair Lauren Baker reported to the AGM on behalf of the Nominations Committee, which had the very difficult task of proposing 11 people who collectively met all the criteria set out by the Steering Committee for the Board of Directors. Welcome to all our new Board members who shall hold their first meeting early in the New Year.  And we extend a very special thanks to everyone who put his or her name forward for the Board or who has served on our Steering Committee.  We hope you will seize some of the other opportunities available for involvement in FSC! 

The Advocacy Panel

We invited a seasoned Member of Parliament (Libby Davies, MP for Vancouver East) and a respected academic (Rod MacRae, York University Faculty of Environmental Studies) to share their thoughts about how Food Secure Canada could more effectively advocate on behalf of its members, whether we are talking about a national student nutrition program or meat regulations that do not undermine local producers.   What a rich discussion, which you can listen to here!

Libby Davies laid out three things for successful advocacy at the political level:

• Build relationships for the long term (there are 308 Members of Parliament and too many organizations focus only on the Prime Minister!)
• Follow up with the people you meet with (ask them to do something simple! And then check to see if they did it).  Start local.  Be systematic.
• Build allies with other movements and work together (know the political landscape:  who does what, who is on which committee, what their agenda is).

Rod MacRae offered a different perspective, arguing that big changes often happen at the subterranean regulatory protocol level, not necessarily in legislation where most advocacy organizations focus their attention.  He also spoke of the complexity of food policy (especially given jurisdictional issues), and the rupture between the political level and the civil service, and the fact that civil servants no longer have the expertise on the files they used to because they are frequently moved around the bureaucracy.  That can make civil servants more reliant on outside expertise (that we have or perhaps need to develop), and this opens up possibilities for us to actually get involved in program design.   He finished with a series of question the food movement needs to ask itself:

• Do we have the capacity to properly research our options? Do we have enough knowledge to provide analysis others don’t offer?
• Do we have access to the right people? Do we know how to engage both elected and unelected officials to advance our agenda?
• Where do our ideas fit within a change process? (use a transition framework)
• Are we really prepared to be collaborators (or do we really just prefer being critical)?
• Can we play the inside-outside game? With others?
• Are we in this for the medium to long term?

It was a stimulating session overall. Effective advocacy is all about an inside-outside strategy and that is where the diversity of FSC membership is so valuable.