Acknowledgments: Thank you to Dr. Blake Poland and his inspiration course, Building Community Resilience, for the opportunity to be creative and explore resilience in a way that was meaningful to us. Thank you for group member Megan Omstead for your contributions to the project. Thank you to game guru Jonathan from Snakes and Lattes for your expertise and advice in developing this game.
5. REFERENCES [1] Centeno, C., van Revel, R.,and Burgleman, J-C. 2005. A [1] Westley, F., Olsson, P., Folke, C., Homer-Dixon, T., Vredenburg, H., Loorbach, D., Thompson, J., Nilsson, M., Lambin, E., Sendzimir, J., Banderjee, B., Galaz, V. & va der Leeuw., S. (2011). Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation. A Journal of the Human Environment, 40(7), 762-780.
Figure 1. Board game and components
[2] Ernstson, H., Van Der Leeuw, S. E., Redman, C. L., Meffert, D. J., Davis, G., Alfsent, C. and Elmqvist, T. (2010). Urban transitions: On urban resilience and human-dominated ecosystems. Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, 39(8), 531-545.
3. APPLICATION AND RESULTS We envision Feast or Famine to be incorporated into classrooms, community centres, homes, and food-related organizations to facilitate learning about food systems resilience. Feast or Famine is an accessible, useful, affordable, and fun learning tool. In order to communicate these complex concepts to diverse audiences, Feast or Famine is grounded in examples of resilience and emerging threats to teach players about the lived realities of food insecurity in a time of accelerating environmental and social crises. This contextualization supports players to develop critical consciousness, and to recognize the constructed nature of their worlds and the opportunities for transformation that exists in their lives. Furthermore, we assert that a cooperative game where players must work together against the board to overcome emerging threats is the most appropriate way to teach resilience thinking and food security because this interactive format encourages relationship building, communication, consensus building, and collective problem solving among players. We hope playing Feast or Famine will be a part of a transformational learning process for players to better understand their own communities, power differences, and how personal choices at local levels can affect food systems. 4. CONCLUDING REMARKS We hope that Feast or Famine will contribute to a new narrative about the future - a realistic, but optimistic perspective about emerging environmental threats and the critical need to build resilient communities now. Feast or Famine helps to “undermine the divide between society and nature” (Ernstson, 2010, p. 542) by bridging both individuals’ and communities’ lived realities with global issues of climate change, peak oil, and environmental degradation through contextualized examples. Focusing on the food system helps players draw the necessary connections of food, as a crucial life-sustaining necessity, to building resilience throughout the entire system. We hope Feast or Famine will inspire transformative learning through critical thought and conscious action; we hope players are inspired to harness their power to engage with issues of food security and help build resilience in their communities.
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