Our Daily Bread Prizes

The design, development, implementation, and regulation of rigorous and comprehensive pricing and accounting—true cost pricing and accounting—pricing that includes all the impacts on people and places and accounting that showcases an enterprise's success in incorporating all the impacts—must be undertaken by many good minds with great tenacity to develop collective knowledge that tends—like a compass towards true north—to the goal of a world based on sustainability principles.

Past, present, and future steps to address this goal include:

The 2010 Our Daily Bread Prize Calls for Submissions for sustainable food and farming solutions written as proposed or proven case studies that overcome specific integrated social, environmental, governance/policy, and financial/business challenges. Candidate submissions must be written for a planned publication with a video component that communicates key messages to a wide, diverse audience. Interdisciplinary teams are encouraged.

2010 Our Daily Bread Prize

The $10,000 2010 Prize will be awarded as one $5,000 grand prize and two $2,500 finalist prizes. The winners will be notified during October, 2010 and will be formally announced at a venue that is yet to be finalized.

Current activities (2008-2010):

• As a project of Vital Systems, the host of the 2010 Our Daily Bread Prize, we call for papers that integrate food and farming practices presented as proposed and proven best cases of the most effective ways to secure our food sources, change our eating habits (for both personal and planetary health), halt the extinction of many of the world's species, and grow economic justice through the visions, strategies, life goals, tools, and rewards we craft to be compatible with our new world story. Many thanks to the jurors who have stepped forward to select the best submissions from among us responding to this Call as candidates and candidate teams. We will have the honor of presenting and thanking them formally and publicly after the completion of their deliberations of candidate submissions and selection of our 2010 Our Daily Bread Prize winners.
• We also welcome you to serve as a Community Outreach Leader by sending Calls for Submissions to your communities to reach a significant number of potential candidates. In addition, if you publish a newsletteror e-newsletter, participate in working groups, consultancies, or associations, or have relationships with authors or media associates working on behalf of expanding food and farming business practices to include impacts on people and places worldwide, please forward both the Call for Submissions for the 2010 Our Daily Bread Prize and the 2010 Our Daily Bread Prize Frequently Asked Questions, or contact us! All final candidate submissions are due by August 11, 2010.
• In addressing the challenges of systemic collapse, one important path to success is to ensure that information on which we can act is clear, current, and accessible to a broad and diverse public. As our Co-evolve logo connotes, Sustainable Ventures and now Vital Systems gathers collective knowledge and then translates what we have compiled so that we each can act effectively in implementing sustainability in our own lives. Vital Systems is actively seeking collaborating organizations to create a long standing entity to sustain this function.

Phase II of the ODB Prize Program (2007-2010):

• Convened and facilitated Pricing the Food on the Table Forum including:
  1. Convened Implementation Forum 2, a full day working session-in alliance with Slow Food Nation in San Francisco, Labor Day weekend, 2008-in which 18 participants true cost priced an organic meal for 24 sourced within 100 miles.
  2. Supported an on-line forum of Sustainability Market Leaders to support each other to address shared challenges and practices and create space for collaborations as a Community of Practice.
  3. Produced an open-source Brochure that examines the findings and observations from field collaborations with Berkeley Farmers' Market, Growing Good Food Language (to add comments, go here), and a report on True Cost Pricing in Certified Farmers' Markets.
  4. Provided status of True Cost Accounting alpha phase 2007-2008.
• Qualified and enrolled over 60 Sustainability Market Leaders from nine market sectors to provide true cost pricing in language and presentation formats people can easily understand and apply to their own lives. Sustainable Ventures facilitated this group to evolve into a Community of Practice – a self-governing body that supports each other to address shared challenges and practices and creates the space for collaborative efforts.

Phase I of the ODB Prize Program (2005-2007):

• Designed the 2006 Our Daily Bread Prize
• Hosted a Candidates' Forum, a Working Group for serious Candidates, for the 2006 Our Daily Bread Prize, hosted by Tufts University, Boston
• Awarded the 2006 Our Daily Bread Prize at SRI in the Rockies
  
• Convened Sustainability Market Leaders in Implementation Forum 1, in collaboration with the Graduate School of Environmental Studies and Forestry, SUNY, Syracuse, NY