Imagine creating a food future where all people have access to nourishing affordable food, growing practices are regenerative, and our food systems transition from being global and fragile to regional and resilient.

An expert in reimagining resilient local food systems, Barbara Swartzentruber is currently Executive Director of the Smart Cities Office at the City of Guelph, where the City and County of Wellington are collaborating with public and private sector partners to build a circular, regenerative regional food system.

Facing international problems of daunting proportions, we interrogate: what are the roles of individuals, communities, and cities? Can we stomach the current economic model, and what are the alternatives? How can food connect and strengthen community?

Fossil fuel narratives seep into our culture, media, politics, and minds, and it can be hard to extricate them from our lives. Fortunately, we can create our own hopeful narratives of possible climate futures that run like fast-moving rivers from person to person.

Grace Nosek is a climate justice scholar, community organizer, and storyteller. Grace has spent years studying and deconstructing the narratives and tactics of the fossil fuel industry - as well as creating her own hopeful climate narratives.

We can find the veins and rivulets of care that already exist in the growing climate movement, and together rewrite the future.

We live as part of a wondrous planet, an intricate web of interconnections and relationships. Systems thinking helps us to see interconnections and complexities, and learn from systems like a body, ecosystem, or planet. Multisolving helps us solve complex problems by taking actions that result in many interconnected benefits. This conversation looks at both systems thinking and multisolving - starting with a decades-long experience of cultivating an intentional community. Guest Dr. Elizabeth Sawin brings decades of experience as a systems thinker who leans into complexity to help small seeds grow into big changes.