National Farmer’s Union STEAM Challenge Event kickstarts a long-term initiative to drive change and create a pipeline of diverse talent for the UK food and farming sector.
Agriculture is facing unprecedented pressure, accelerated by increasing and widespread skills shortages. As the least ethnically diverse sector in the UK, there is an urgent need to drive the social, cultural and economic value of agriculture by harnessing the power of voices and skills of a workforce that embraces and includes all people. Just 1% of the agricultural workforce identifyies as Black, Asian and minority ethnic despite 17% of the British adult population, 15% of the workforce and 33% of school-aged children identifying as people from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. As an industry, this issue has been increasingly identified and discussed yet, despite this, projects looking to directly address this challenge have failed to materialise. To address this, the National Farmer’s Union (NFU) Education in partnership with the Outward Bound Trust, launched a ground-breaking Challenge Event looking to collectively address the question: how can we attract and support students from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds into agriculture?
The STEAM Challenge Event, delivered by STEAMhouse, kickstarted a long-term initiative, the AgriFuture Scholarship Programme, to drive change and create a pipeline of diverse talent for the UK food and farming sector. STEAM Challenge Events are one to two-day open innovation events designed to help make change in industry and amplify impact. Collaborating across sectors, participants interrogate systemic and emerging challenges and find opportunity spaces for development. This Challenge event brought together over 70 representatives from across the sector to understand the scale of the challenge, who were then guided through a process which enabled participants to work together to discover where, how and why the challenge is created and maintained, and create meaningful opportunities for action.
The Challenge Event was driven by enlightening perspective-sharing presentations, and the use of the tools from our Innovation Toolbox: Problem Mapper and Bright Spot Finder. Our Innovation Toolbox is an open-source collection of collaborative methods and activities to help you understand problems and create new products, services or projects in response.
By using our Problem Mapper tool, participants got to know the challenge in more detail and identified where and how it occurs, enabling the room to think about opportunities to address the challenge. Beginning with describing the challenge, a probing process wass then undertaken of asking why the challenge occurs again.. and again… and again… and again until the root cause was identified. Based on the discovery of the root cause, the problem was then re-articulated by everyone and then explored from all angles, until one challenge statement was articulated by each of the 10 groups.
The Bright Spot Finder tool then helped participants discover the potential for change within existing systems and explore the benefits and consequences that come by acting upon opportunities. The tool starts by helping people identify Bright Spots for change and what makes them ‘best in class’. With each Bright Spot, benefits and consequences for making the Bright Spot bigger are mapped out, which is followed by plotting the Bright Spots on a Capability and Impact matrix. The top Bright Spots are identified, and then reflections made on how to make them a reality.
Alongside interactive Tool session, British Veterinary Ethnicity and Diversity Society co-founder and Nuffield scholar Navaratnam Partheeban offered insights into his lived experiences as a vet and advocate for inclusivity, while Food writer and presenter Mallika Basu highlighted the economic and social benefits of inclusivity in agriculture, while BAMEed Network representative Kulvinder Johal addressed barriers faced by young people, particularly from ethnic minority backgrounds.
NFU vice president Rachel Hallos commented on the STEAM Challenge Event: “better reflecting the diversity of the UK population isn’t just the right thing to do for agriculture, it’s essential to its future. That’s as much about ensuring the sector attracts the very best people regardless of their ethnicity or background as it is about being a sector that our future customers feel reflects them and their lives.”
