Following collaborations that started in 2000, a community-based participatory action research (CB-PAR) process launched in 2009 when CAN, PRODECOOP, and the Asociación de Desarrollo Social de Nicaragua (ASDENIC), signed an agreement to end seasonal hunger among northern Nicaragua’s small scale coffee farmers. In the beginning of the CB-PAR process, we identified the frequent environmental and economic disruption that impacted food security and built trust with partners through sharing agroecological ideals and developing a vision for the next steps of the process. Next iterations of the cycle included partnering with the Campesino-a-Campesino program; key results included seed banks, forums with farmers on agroecology and the re-localization of food systems, and investing into cooperative-led grain storage and redistribution centers with connection to local centers. Recent collaborations focused on designing dissemination materials and drafting the agroecology and food security component of PRODECOOP’s 10-year strategic plan. See a more in-depth version of our collaboration timeline below.
