Building Belonging: A Workshop on Creating Stronger Companies, Communities, and Movements | Barley Room
For decades, the natural foods movement has been built on values. How might we deepen that work by cultivating the conditions where people feel that they actually belong to those values, rather than only identify with them?
What if the future of loyalty isn’t something we earn through better marketing programs but something we cultivate through belonging?
Through stories, frameworks, and reflections from leaders in the food co-op community, participants will explore a fundamental shift in how we think about engagement: moving from asking, “How do we make people loyal to us?” to, “How do we inspire people to recognize themselves as participants in the story we are creating?”
Together, we will examine how organizations can create the conditions for people to see themselves as part of something meaningful.
We will explore how shared values become more powerful when they are not just communicated, but experienced.
The session will introduce perspectives on narrative, shared stories, and belonging, then invite participants into a generative workshop to imagine new ways of building belonging within your own organizations, throughout the Provender Alliance, and across the broader natural foods movement.
Jon Steinman | Food Co-Op Educator | Grocery Story Press
Jon Steinman is a food systems thinker, author, and educator with a 25-year career exploring how communities engage with food. From the soil to the shelf, from community building to co-operative groceries, his work revolves around a single question: what if our food supply chains put people, health, and communities first?
As the author of Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants, Jon’s work continues to strengthen and amplify the role of community ownership and stewardship of independent grocery stores. A former board president of the Kootenay Co-op, Canada’s largest natural foods co-op, Jon now leads Grocery Story Press — publisher of This Could Be Ours, the Food Co-op Finder app, and a growing suite of webinars and resources for retail grocery co-ops across the U.S. and Canada.
Jon regularly facilitates workshops and dialogues at conferences, using an approach to mindful and inclusive communication he calls Cooperative Dialogue – inspired by his training as an Accredited Professional Dialogue Practitioner with the Academy of Professional Dialogue.