(Host)
Commentator Rich Nadworny is an expert in new media and digital
marketing. Recently, he took part in an event designed to jump-start
design thinking and innovation – a skill set that looks to play an
important role in Vermont’s economic future.
(Nadworny) A few
weeks ago I organized an event called a Social Hack. It was an extension
of the social media breakfast events some colleagues and I have been
running for the past three years. Usually we bring in national speakers
for a morning event, with food, of course, to inspire our local
community while providing us Vermonters a chance to actually meet with
one another.
This time, though, we did something different. In
addition to bringing in two amazing speakers, we actually got people to
spend the day tackling a key social and economic issue in Vermont: the
Localvore issue.
In Vermont, the local food system supplies16%
of all private sector jobs in the state and food manufacturing is the
state’s second largest manufacturing industry. The Farm to Plate
strategic initiative has the goal of increasing our local food
production by 5% over a 10 year period to help grow our local economy
and to improve the health of all Vermonters. Our challenge was to
identify ways to facilitate that growth.
During the Social Hack,
people of various backgrounds, who had never worked together or met
each other before, let their creativity run wild. My favorite image was
probably watching the Insurance guy, wearing the only blazer in the
audience, brainstorming with the cool, tattooed Burton Snowboarder.
The
idea that their group, Team Beet, came up with was an idea based on an
Apple A Day. They called it the Core Card. Using your smart phone, you’d
track all of the times you ate local food or shopped at a farm or
farmers market. You’d earn rewards while your information would help
insurers lower premiums by proving you were eating healthier. Kind of
like safe driver discounts.
Another group, Team Kale, came up
with a game called Ate 02 (that’s A-T-E) in which people competed with
each other by snapping pictures of Vermont Localvore products they
bought. The pictures would earn them points they could redeem for
discounts and other rewards.
The group with the winning idea,
Team Arugula, reimagined the milkman into the modern CSA. They concepted
a system where busy people could check their phone or Web to see what
produce and semi-prepared food they could buy, and plan what food they
could make with it. Then, they could meet a farm truck on its Beet Route
and purchase local food for a quick and nutritious dinner.
Our
next step is to work with Champlain College and the Agency of
Agriculture to develop one of these solutions. But beyond that, many
participants have taken steps on their own to either flesh out the
business plans, or to build out their own ideas from those that the
groups didn’t choose.
The most interesting part for me, though,
was to show and reaffirm to everyone what a talented bunch of people we
actually have in our state. The social hack was really an experiment to
see what energy we could release in the community when we combined our
best Vermont resource. People.