Urban Food Systems in Flint, Michigan: Identifying Leverage Points

Building on four years of participatory data collection with collaborators in Flint, the research team of the FLPP hosted a scenarios workshop in October 2022 at the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan. A scenarios workshop is a place where the community and researchers work together to co-create scenarios for the future, based on previously defined values and leverage points. A scenario is a narrative description of actionable pathways towards an equitable, sustainable and just food system in Flint in 20 years from now (2042).

We designed a workbook entitled “Scenario planning workbook: Leveraging food system change in Flint” as a facilitation tool for the scenarios workshop. This workbook guides the workshop process to co-create scenarios that represent plausible, yet transformative, descriptions of a positive future for the food system in 2042. The workbook is available for download here.

We developed a report with the four resulting scenarios that were co-created by community partners during the workshop. To access the full report, click here. To access each scenario individually as its own file, visit the following links:   

• “Nutrition, Equity and Justice in Flint”
• “Community Unity”
• “The Peoples Market”
• “Empowering Choices”

If you are interested in hosting a scenarios workshop of your own, please use the workbook or get in touch with our scenarios team: Rafael Lembi (lembi@msu.edu) and Chelsea Wentworth (wentwo21@msu.edu).