Case Study: Our Food Future achieves Canada’s first circular food economy with Open Social

Creating Canada’s First Circular Food Economy

Our Food Future is Guelph–Wellington’s Smart Cities initiative to build Canada’s first circular food economy by reducing food waste, increasing access to nutritious food and connecting nutritionists, farmers, businesses, government and citizens. Their main challenge was “making it simple for people to connect” across many stakeholders, so they turned to Open Social’s community platform to unify their project website and existing online community into a single, accessible hub.

Open Social migrated and consolidated content onto a single platform, giving Our Food Future an informational homepage, a Kitchen Table community space, flexible Groups, a management dashboard and the Crowd Innovation extension for running Challenges. The Open Social solution made the site easy to manage and increased engagement—Our Food Future now has over 680 members, has run 15 live community events, distributed $102,000 through Challenges (including a $70,000 GW Urban Agriculture award), and launched projects like the Pfisterer Farm greenhouse and Yorklands Food Hub.

Our Food Future