Connecting our Community of Communities

The role of the Incredible Edible network has always been, amongst other things, to tell and amplify the stories of Incredible Edible groups across both the UK and the world. Sharing  stories and celebrating the incredible people who give their time every day, week or month to create kinder communities through food, whether that is cooking a community meal, growing food for the community or sharing their skills with others, are important ways of us as a network showing how we are making real change across the UK and the world. This is important as we forge forwards in our mission to make a kinder world, as it shows a common goal to support change as grassroots community groups, led by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. These are important stories but how do we make them heard?

With the rise of social media it’s never been easier to tell those tales and get them out into an arena that looks forward to hearing from us. But as we put things out onto the various social media platforms, which become ever louder each day, and where people often fail to think before they type, how do we ensure we make and support a kinder space on social media and step outside the unpleasantness? Many people suggest social media isn’t for them but rather than thinking of it as being a place that can be oppressive or frightening, by being courageous and putting those positive tales out into the ether of the internet, we are all supporting a better, kinder media. And by sharing these stories we amplify each others work, and at the same time strengthen our community and our network.

But what with algorithms, adverts and fast moving timelines how do we ensure we can find each others posts? No one has time to scroll through individual timelines every day, especially if using several different platforms so how do we support each other in a way that isn’t overwhelming?

Of course hashtags are the way forwards across all the platforms and give the opportunity to just look at one feed, find the stories we all want to find and share them both within our Incredible Edible networks but also where appropriate, within the other networks that inevitably cross over in our communities. So we thought about tags that would work across the networks and came up with the following……..

#PowerOfSmallActions

#IncredibleEdible

#IfYouEatYoureIn

#ConnectedCommunities

#KindnessInAction.

Over the following year we will also lead some campaigns across our social media platforms that we hope the whole network can get behind, so we can really show the power of creating our own news and media that we know is safe and reliable.

And one last thing! You will notice we capitalise the first letter of each word in a tag. This is so that people who rely on apps to read online news can join in and understand the tags we are using as these apps can pick the tags up as long as each word has a capital letter!!