RECIPES Guiding Principles and Community Norms

Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Multiscale RECIPES for Sustainable Food Systems network (henceforth referred to as "RECIPES" or "the RECIPES Network") is a national food waste research network bringing together over 40 researchers and 15 institutions and other partners across the country working to advance the science needed to make our wasteful food system sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

In addition to wasted food, one of the other priorities of NSF and this grant was "convergent research" or "convergence"—research that is driven by a specific and compelling problem, that intentionally merges and deeply integrates disciplines with one another. As part of the original grant proposal, part of the responsibility and role of MICA's Center for Creative Impact was to support and enable convergent thinking and action amongst network members.

Throughout the 5 years of RECIPES, the MICA team fulfilled this role through a variety of projects, including facilitating a process to help the network develop a set of Guiding Principles and Community Norms.

Oftentimes in human-centered design projects, teams may elect to create a set of Guiding Principles and Community norms to help determine and guide how they want to collaborate and conduct their work, based on the group's beliefs, intentions, and/or values.

With such a large and diverse network of people, institutions, and disciplines collaborating together, it was important for RECIPES to co-create protocols to help us work together while remaining accountable to our ideals and goals. Beginning with our network kick-off meetings in November 2021 and continuing through a nearly year-long collective process involving a series of virtual and in-person facilitated design sessions, the Network collectively defined a set of Guiding Principles and Community Norms.

• Guiding Principles represent what we believe in and what is important to us, what we value. They represent our high-level inspirational and aspirational direction that informs our actions, decisions, and outputs.

• Community Norms are how we put our Guiding Principles into action. Norms are specific and action-oriented. They are meant to influence our day-to-day interaction and can be the equivalent to a 'code of conduct'.

The Guiding Principles and Community Norms were developed to be a living document. After they were developed in the first year of RECIPES, we revisited them and the Network was collectively asked to consider if they should or needed to evolve with our Network's progression at the first Annual Meeting in the second year of the grant.

As a new part of the Center for Creative Impact's team and having joined RECIPES in Year 2, I was not a part of the development process. However, I helped organize and synthesize feedback from the Annual Meeting and designed the self-published PDF, linked below.