📜 Where does campaigning end and policymaking begin?

It’s very rare that people admit to how much they don’t know in a meeting. In any niche that you get into, we start using acronyms. We start talking about things in certain ways or at a really high level. Someone will say something like “I spoke to Pete”… who is Pete? How are people meant to know if they’re not in that particular niche? It’s so important to speak in simple language that anyone can understand. We should be making it accessible pretty much all of the time. Otherwise, we’re just not going to get anywhere.

It’s hard to know where campaigning ends and policymaking begins. Do we set out specific policy details that we want policymakers to bring in, or do we call for changes, make the case and then leave them to make the decision on how to do it?

Framing gets us so far. It definitely does help us to make the case in a useful way. But we also need to be listening to the kinds of ways in which target audiences talk, what their concerns are and see if we can address them. When you think about what framing is, quite often it’s based on focus groups, which are a bunch of people who are talking about how you can unlock that problem for them. But that’s not necessarily the same way of thinking as the people who we’re trying to work with. 

When it comes to the crunch, we need to make food policy reform go beyond public health. It’s really useful to be able to say, “it’s not just us in public health”, and list off all these other different groups that want to see something happen, so you have an army going to that big meeting rather than just you standing there representing that one group or that one cause.