Radical Community Response Ability: Learning Partnerships with "Others"

Despite serving as conduits for social transformation, Multi-Stakeholder-Initiatives (MSIs) pay limited attention to conjunct influence and mutual relatedness to user communities. Distancing language such as “in need” can lead communities to feel Othered, with relatively powerful stakeholders often dictating what is best for them. Individuals can also interpret ‘community’ as something which exists beyond their lives – the very opposite of a stakeholder. To work towards sustainable and inclusive impact therefore requires discovering new possibilities of market and social relationality by paying attention to how MSIs can identify-with, the communities who are at the centre of their efforts as opposed to identifying-as. To this end, our study examines alterity in a cross-sector food partnership, specifically problematising the absence of community within community-focused initiatives. Underpinned by the methodological principles of emancipatory praxis, we have aimed to increase awareness of the contradictions either hidden or distorted by these everyday understandings and in doing so, (re)direct attention to the possibilities for social transformation in the present configuration of those social processes (Hutton and Heath 2020). Embracing the broader change goals of marketing practice, orientated towards a range of priority stakeholders, we have built a community-led evidence base to deliver societal benefit, influence policy and improve community health and well-being designing a learning partnership with marginal groups on the issue of nutritional access within micro-communities. Key impact drivers include informing cross-sector stakeholder plans on the development and delivery of nutritional solutions, influencing district-level policy, specifically the local health and well-being plan and the social-inclusion plan and cultivating research capabilities of cross-sector stakeholders with the aim of retaining the community voice for building sustainable and inclusive impact moving forward.