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| Table of Contents |
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Additional resources
- FairFood-Share Point Mini Manual
- Cooperations Manual
- Foodsaving at festivals
- Disco BÔcÔ Toolkit
- Ethercalc Template Sheet for Store Pick-ups
- Benefits for Cooperating Stores
- Background Information
- Guideline for Nice Cooperation among Team Members
- Shortened and translated version of foodsharing.de's legal agreement
- Liability Contract from foodsharing Edinburgh
- Legal Statement from LivsmeDela Uppsala
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Building a foodsharing community
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There are many activities that can be set up to get to know each other and create bonds. Here are some ideas of events that we found relevant, fun, easy to organize and engaging:
- FairFood-Share Point construction workshop: if you want to set up a location where people can share food unconditionally, this can be a wonderful activity for members to connect. Here you can find relevant information about our precious FairFood-Share Points, the foodsaver's hub!
- Brunch with saved food : if Sunday brunch is a thing in your town, there will surely be open-brunch cafés and restaurants who usually have a lot of yummy leftovers that can be saved. Get in touch with them, bring a lot of containers, from small to big, and save it! If you have access to a location nearby like a neighborhood center, a foodsaver's living room or a park in the warmer days, you can invite your whole community to join for a late and sustainable Sunday brunch
- Saving at festivals: Music festivals are a great saving opportunity, not only for food but for various items people leave behind there. It also is fun to go to a festival with your friends! So why not combine the two? Here you can find more detailed information on this idea.
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- Make sure you keep a secure database of your members with contacts and addresses, respectful of data privacy and protection laws
- Map the members out, it will give you a clearer overview of who can help where
Organizing the foodsaving
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A lot of people use facebook groups, which is not ideal at all to organize the saving, but can be useful for the sharing part, since it is easy to reach a lot of people as soon as the group is slightly known by local people. To keep the overview of the saving, tables have been proven useful. If you want to, you can have a look at this Ethercalc template sheet to get an idea of what info should be included there. It's important to use something in the cloud for people to collaboratively work on. Because then there is no need for a leader who puts people on the list and foodsavers rather write their own names in the cells of the pick-ups they're interested in. This, of course, only works with reliable and reasonable foodsavers, who take the foodsaving seriously, so make sure you communicate things like expectations and etiquette accordingly! Please refer to the checklist 'Professionalism for foodsavers', which you can find in the cooperation mini manual as well, if you are interested in behavioural standards, that have been proven to be useful in Germany.
Raising Awareness
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There are many possibilities to get people's interest up: Events like disco soups or temporary FairFood-Share Points, where saved food gets distributed to the people, always get a lot of attention. And on top of that they're fun and a great opportunity to enlarge your community with more like-minded people!
You could also run an awareness rising campaign among politicians, asking for a modification of the law and making this matter public.
For instance, over the course of 2015 and 2016 foodsharing.de has actively participated in the Leere Tonne ("Empty bins") campaign, using a petition to ask the German government to adopt a similar law as the one voted for in the French Parliament in spring 2016, which forces supermarkets to give away their food waste.
Keep in mind that, as far as political parties are concerned, foodsharing stays as neutral as possible.
Legal situation
- First of all, you will need to thoroughly check the legal situation in your country, regarding consumption of products that have passed their Best Before Date. Foodsharing.de is legally allowed to exist thanks to a simple liability contract signed by every new Foodsaver, which acts as a waiver and clearly states that the food donor is excluded from liability of negligence. Here you can find the German one used by foodsharing.de and here the English one from the Edinburgh initiative.
- The legal situation for FairFood-Share Points is slightly different but also based on foodsharing being seen as individuals sharing food without the continuity and big administartive efforts organizations provide. The Swedish initiative LivsmeDela from Uppsala has come up with a nicely written sheet on the legal situation for FairFood-Share Points based on European law, which you can find here.
- It may be useful to register your community as a legal entity, which we recommend for liability reasons. Example: as a private person without a legal entity, you would take full responsibility if sued in court for food poisoning. The situations vary a lot from country to country and, frankly, we find it hard enough to research the legal situation in our own country, so hold on tight, check it out yourself and tell us what you found out!
- Staying away from money saves you a lot of trouble: You get food for free, so don't screw the nicely cooperating business by selling it!
If your country is following that awesome trend of forbidding supermarkets to throw away food (that we hope will expand to the whole EU... and further?), don't just assume that foodsharing isn't needed anymore. The amount of waste that comes from bakeries, cafés, grocery stores, brunch restaurants and so on is big enough to keep a big community of volunteers working quite actively! Maybe in those countries where food waste is banned (France as to February 2016, Italy considering it around the same time, certain southern Belgian municipalities having implemented it years ago), it could actually be the best time to get the supermarkets to cooperate with foodsaving as they must legally get rid of the food, and the existing organizations probably don't have the infrastructure and the needs to process all these donations just yet.
