Thanks to everyone who came out to brainstorm for the Advocacy Committee’s upcoming municipal election project.
At our first Discussion Meet-Up on January 21, we discussed how the TYFPC can help youth get informed about the upcoming municipal election. We are envisioning a multi-staged project:
- Ask youth what food issues they would like to talk to their municipal government candidates about.
- Based on what we hear, ask for candidate positions on a few key food issues.
- Present the candidate responses back to youth to help them make informed election decisions.
Our discussion gave us some great ideas and some direction for how to move forward. For instance, some of the questions that will need to be answered along the way include:
- How do we ask youth about what food issues are most important to them? We have decided to create a survey that we will send out to the TYFPC Community. You can fill out the survey here.
- Do we want to include ALL municipal candidates for mayor and council positions in this project? This is something we will need to decide as we figure out the resources that are available to us and the energy required to get responses from candidates.
- Are there other organizations with similar ideas or mandates that we can collaborate with to add weight to our request for input from the candidates, or to extend the reach of our gathered candidate data? This is something that the TYFPC Networking Committee can help us explore.
- How do we best engage youth in this process? We will be looking for input from our TYFPC Community, as well as any collaborating partners.
- How do we best engage our municipal government candidates in this process? We will be thinking strategically and doing some research to ensure we maximize our resources and our response rate. A suggestion from the meet-up was to also write brief issue papers on the key issues identified by the TYFPC Community. We would then present the issue papers to candidates as a way of getting them, or keeping them, engaged in food issues.
If you are interested in hearing more and/or getting involved with this project, please come out to our next Discussion Meet-Up on Tuesday, February 25 at 6pm, location TBA. Email Kaylen at kfredrickson@tyfpc.ca to get more info, or introduce yourself at our Community Meeting on February 3, or check TYFPC’s Facebook and blog closer to February 25. At our next Discussion Meet-Up, we will be discussing how municipal elections work, reviewing potential collaborating partners, and thinking about how to best proceed with contacting candidates.