HORIZON EUROPE CULTIVATE Project: Co-designing innovation to share food for resilience

CULTIVATE uses a multi-stakeholder approach to build sustainability and resilience in urban and peri-urban areas through an innovative online platform supporting social innovation: The Food Sharing Compass. Built with and for five key stakeholder groups (food sharing initiatives, policymakers, food supply actors, researchers, and citizens), the platform will navigate diverse food sharing landscapes and cultures to understand, develop, replicate, scale up, and strengthen sustainable food sharing in Europe, supporting the European Green Deal Action Plan, Food 2030, the Farm to Fork Strategy, and the EU's climate change ambitions.

The open access Food Sharing Compass will comprise five innovative tools:

1. The SHARECITY200 database, an automated interactive mapping, tracking and monitoring database of food sharing initiatives that will add over 100 new locations to the SHARECITY100 database [https://sharecity.ie/research/sharecity100-database/].
2. The Food Exchange Calculator, which enables a comprehensive and holistic assessment of the costs, benefits, and impacts of food exchange for all stakeholders.
3. The Good Governance Menu, which offers options for developing policies that facilitate sustainable food exchange.
4. The Citizen Participation Library, which supports the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of inclusive participation in sustainable food sharing.
5. The Community of Practice for Sustainable Food Sharing, which will be established through a tailored Scaling-Up Program, will optimize the potential for mutual learning and exploitation of the Food Sharing Compass well beyond the project. Essentially, CULTIVATE will establish the EU as a global leader in developing resilient and inclusive food sharing economies, identifying drivers and gaps in implementation and challenging existing theories and practices that currently limit sustainable food sharing.