aGROECOLOGY & ENTERPRISE, BANGLADESH
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From 2021 to 2023, Island Reach collaborated with Nari Jhuri, ("Women's Basket") a member-based social enterprise network connecting over 350 women's entrepreneurial centers across Bangladesh, and United Purpose Bangladesh. The project aim was to collectively build dynamic and value-enhanced stories to advance communities' participation in agroecological transitions and create compelling market narratives that forefront healthier foods and promote solidarity markets able to outcompete commodity markets. Trialed in the regions of Jamalphur, Khulna, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, this is an ongoing experiment being shared and adapted to local contexts across Nari Jhuri groups. One outcome of the project was the production of a toolkit in Bangla for Nari Jhuri for ongoing peer-to-peer knowledge sharing with new centers and new regions.
English versions of booklets
"It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with" Marilyn Strathern, 1992
Everyone brought resources to the table.
Everyone brought resources to the table.
The women entrepreneurs offered their farm and market knowledge and leadership, masterful storytelling and their valuable time in the midst of farm and care work.
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United Purpose Bangladesh brought in-kind resources and staffing, their experiential knowledge, and local expertise.
Island Reach brought in $20,000 USD in the first year, and $5000 the second year, along with an array of skill sets through both remote and in-country engagements.
The teams created unique multi-armed Value Webs (like a spider's web), populated with wide-ranging data for story crafting and narrative framings
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WORKSHOP AT UPB
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8 Core Arms of Nari Juri's Value-Web: 1) Relations with land, water (air, and more) 2) Relations with community 3) Innovation: Relationships with new methods & practices, including technologies 4) Women's leadership 5) Holistic Well Being 6) Cultures of ownership & food sovereignty 7) Heritage: Traditional knowledge & practice 8) Policy & Government |
VALUE WEB FOR MUSHROOMS
Creating a Value web is an open-ended activity that enables participants to use dialogic and iterative feedback processes to explore, create, recover, and refine narrative framings in a manner that vitalizes and adapts traditional and new knowledges.
Using a Value Web is a version of a Living Lab, that is, it is a dynamically fluid experimental process where participants are immersed in a creative activity that shapes agroecological transformation in their particular and unique local context. |
AGROECOLOGICAL FACT & PROMPT CARDS ENLIVEN ROLE PLAY
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NARI JHURI MARKET TRUCK IN JAMALPHUR
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Knowledge co-creation between groups was enriched with a "Two Eyed Seeing" approach, an indigenous frame adapted from the Mi'kmaq of Atlantic Canada. This approach promotes viewing the world "from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together".
READ MORE ABOUT THIS COLLABORATION HERE
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