Food Ladders Toolkit – Framing

How we communicate is key to what we want to achieve.

Building Food Ladders is about driving social change through its affinity with Asset-Based Community Development. ABCD uses the power of positive and pro-active, solution-driven framing to achieve its ends. Leeds implemented an ABCD approach with successful results. They reported that the approach offered a significant social return on investment and calculated that every £1 invested in ABCD earned up to £14 in social value within communities.

Communications fail for three reasons. The first is because people do not understand what is being communicated (understanding). The second is because the people who can act on your communications haven’t heard the messages you are trying to share (reach). The third is because their response are not the desired ones (agreement). How you frame your communications will increase the success of your communications.

Framing is the choices we make in what we say and how we say it. What we emphasise, how and what we explain, what we leave unsaid. These choices matter. They affect how people hear us, what they understand, and how they act. When we change the story and how we tell it, we can change the world.
FrameWorks Instiutue

This part of the toolkit has five parts.

Most likely you will need to return to these tools throughout your process. Thinking about framing before you build your parnterships will help you communicate with them. Once they have joined the journey with you, revisiting the framing tools and spending time working with them to agree the terms and ways you will communicate will embed these frames in your process. Finally, revising the framing will also help you consider your vision and what you can achieve.

What framing is and how to think about it

The Frameworks Institute have identified several truths to consider when framing for progressive social change. These are:

The way we frame an issue determines how people think about them.

Facts alone do not help the public understand social problems or drive them to take action.

Facts do not speak for themselves. Without appropriate framing wrapped around them, dominant narratives will take over.

Giving air time to myths and misunderstandings increases the strength of those myths and misunderstandings.

Crisis messaging leads to crisis fatigue and makes people feel helpless.

Tool 1: The Frameworks Institute provides tools to help us think about our language. They include a series of short videos that do the following with clear and concise instructions for how to frame to achieve desired outcomes and persuade people to become involved.

Introduce why framing matters

Solutions-oriented framing to increase motivation

Framing Data

Alternatives to vulnerability framing that individualise

Using visuals to spark big-picture framing

How to tell stories of success that express collectivity, ingenuity and progress

There are also several written texts that offer further insights into how to frame more effectively. All can be found here. Including one specifically on policy-making and implementation as well as several issue focused examples.

Framing food security

Although the food ladders can be applied to other areas of the food system, the way the framework has been widely used to respond to and address the shocking rises in hunger and hardship that affect some groups and places disproportionately. This section challenges you to think about how you approach framing responses to this situation.

Tool 2: Case study example of why framing matters

The example below illustrates the importance of choosing our words carefully. Thinking about what we say and how we say it also prompts us to think carefully about whose interests are being served by the language used.

An example of framing and its wider impacts:

When we talk about food poverty, people immediately think it is an issue linked purely to a lack of money. But the struggle to be food security is more than that. Money is part of the problem, of course. But being able to buy food is only part of the explanation.

Two people with the same amount of money may experience food security differently. One might have excellent cooking skills and access to land for growing food, as well as adequate storage and tools to prepare meals, and the physical and mental health to complete the tasks involves. The other might lack these skills, amenities and health. One might live near affordable, high-quality food sources, while the other must spend additional money to access such resources. The availability of these resources can determine whether one can eat or not.

Food poverty is also language that separates people into groups. The first group are those who are not in poverty and have food, and the second group is those who are in poverty and do not have food. It ignores the differences between the people described above.

Most people whom others might identify as being in food poverty don’t see or describe themselves in this way. They describe their situation as one of struggle, difficulty, or hardship, not poverty.

The effects of language that divides are myriad. Struggling people often do not access help soon enough because they think it is for someone else. Divisive language undermines and ignores the other assets people may have that increase their capability to be food secure, resulting in an internalised lack of confidence in their own abilities that often results in further mental health pressures.

This divisive language also suggests that those who are not in food poverty don’t have anything to worry about and are not part of the problem or beneficiaries of the solutions. However, if we use the words food security, this gives rise to a shared continuum. We are all on this continuum and we all have an interest and part to play.

Tool 3: Workshop for talking about framing responses in your network

Positive framing does not come easily and has to be practised. It also has to be implemented in every communication. As you bring your network together, spend time working out the framing and agree the language you will use going forward. Discussing what language to use and asking who benefits from that language will inspire collective understanding and buy-in. As people get used to hearing different messages, their use of them will increase, and understanding will change.

Show your participants the following two films. The first is the foodbank scene from Ken Loch’s film I, Daniel Blake (5 minutes). The second, is a film about community organisation called More than Just Food (10 minutes). Both speak to the struggles of food insecurity in communities but the videos can help you frame the discussion in different ways and reflect on the effects of that framing in terms of the impact on communities but also how you respond to the situations.

After watching the films discuss the questions below. You can do this in groups with each group feeding back if working with a large group.

How does each film leave you feeling? (e.g., inspired, sad, hopeful, helpless, etc).
How do you feel about the people in the films?
How do you feel the people in each film feel about their engagements with the support they are receiving? What relationships are being expressed?
Do you feel like the people in each film have any power over their circumstances?
What assets and resources do the people in each film have for changing their circumstances?
What is the role of community in each of these films? What change is happening as a result of the way support is framed?
Are there specific circumstances when you think one framing might be better than another? Why?
What can you take forward from this discussion for the way you frame your communities, the people in them and their circumstances?

More than just food

Talking about health with framing

Many local authorities situate their food work in public health units because of the clear connections between diet and health (we can also think about the connections between mental health and community building). Using framing to talk about health can also have important implications for getting people on board with framing support differently. The Health Foundation has a toolkit, developed in collaboration with the Frameworks Instutute, that provides guidance for communicating health using positive framing.

Tool 4: How to talk about the building blocks of health

Framing toward Rung 3, From Consumers to Citizens

There are ways to encourage people to think beyond our taken for granted understandings of our relationships with food. The default position is to think of ourselves as consumers in a somewhat passive sense. The Food Ethics Council in their report, Harnessing the Power of Food Citizenship, argues that how we frame our relationships with food shape how we understand our power within the existing food system.

Tool 5: The Food Ethics Council has a toolkit for framing our relationships with food away from being food consumers to food citizens. These tools can be useful for thinking about and setting the stage for the visioning work you do with your stakeholders.

Linking to Government Resilience Strategy and Missions

You may want to consider framing as you negotiate how you will communicate to others about your communities and what you hope to achieve should include how you define resilience. In the Food Ladders, we do think about responding to crisis (because it happens), but people should not live in a permanent state of crisis. Crisis happens because of the conditions that create vulnerability to it. Food Ladders aims to build structures that reduce that vulnerability. That is what rungs 2 and 3 aim to do. This is in line with the UK Government resilience framework.

The current UK government has adopted a mission approach, with five missions that they have committed to. These include increasing economic growth, Prioritising clean energy, Strengthening the NHS, Making British streets safe, and Breaking down barriers at every stage. A mission approach is how the UN sustainable development goals are also framed and many countries worldwide have signed up to these.

While on first blush, these don’t seem to have much to do with food, the fact is that food gets people in the room and is a tool for talking about other things. Food activity at rungs 2 and 3 builds skills, improves health, creates social capital, and fosters community. Framing food ladder activity in alignment with economic growth and the NHS priorities through the generation and support of food businesses, protecting and improving employment conditions, and reducing health inequalities are clear connections. However, we also know that fear of crime is reduced when people talk to each other (as evidenced in the film More than Just Food (above)). Crime is also decreased when there are social spaces for people to spend their time. Breaking down barriers to individual progression happens when people have the confidence, health, and well-being to engage with learning. Building Food Ladders can play a central role in these objectives as well.