… and contribute to Europe-wide innovation policy on the sustainable production of healthy food.

We invite non-profit organisations, business associations and public institutions to co-create scenarios of desirable research programming in the area of food & health on national and/or European level. Expected participants are health professionals, researchers, scientists, representatives of environmental organisations, parents associations, trade unions, food producers and otherwise concerned stakeholders as well as research policy makers. In one-day workshops you will have the opportunity to exchange views on this area, contribute your experiences, make suggestions, voice concerns and develop alternative scenarios in an agreeable atmosphere with no formal slide presentations or lectures.

The workshops in Belgium are organised by the European Network of Science Centres and Museums (Ecsite) and the European Food Information Council (EUFIC) within the INPROFOOD project, which is funded by the European Commission.

When?

The workshops will take place on
– 12 June 2013, 9.00 – 18.00, at the University Foundation,
– 15 June 2013, 9.00 – 18.00, at the University Foundation
Please note that each organisation can participate in one workshop only!

Who can participate?

The workshops address three major stakeholder categories: non-profit/civil society organisations, business associations and public/research organisations.

We invite the following kind of organisations to sign up:

Non-profit/civil society organisations without business ties
These include organisations/associations related to food/nutrition, health, environment (sustainability) or other independent society/consumer oriented organisations that are in no way affiliated to industry, neither by funds nor membership.

Business-oriented associations and research institutions
We invite especially (associations that represent) small and medium enterprises (SME’s) in the food & health area including trade organisations, and private research laboratories/organisations.
The applying organisation is requested to disclose 1) the level of operation (regional, national or international), 2) the number of employees and 3) the yearly budget.

Public institutions
The organisations aimed at are public research institutes, academic institutions providing applied food & health related sciences (not universities), and policy related organisations that operate on sub-national level.

The workshop selection process

Participants shall not represent more than one of the three stakeholder categories. Your organisation’s delegate should have some interest in the area of the production of sustainable and healthy food, research, policy making and/or research programming.

Participation in the event is free, but the number of participants is strictly limited to 24 per workshop, 8 representatives per stakeholder group and 1 participant per organisation.

As the workshop results will impact on research policies, fair and non-arbitrary recruitment is important. If for a workshop there are more than 8 registrations per workshop in the category „public“, „business“ or „nonprofit“, a random selection will decide who shall participate. The random selection will be based on draws of public lotteries. The dates and results of the draws will be announced on the INPROFOOD website. For details of the random selection, see http://www.inprofood.eu/documentation/. Per category up to 25 organisations can sign up. When this limit is reached, it will be announced by closing the category.

The call is open from 3 April to 10 June 2013 (or closes if 75 organisations have signed up).

NOTE: The assignment to either the first or second workshop will be based on the level of influence of the respective stakeholder organisations as INPROFOOD aims to bring together stakeholders with similar hierarchical levels. These criteria differ by stakeholder group ranging from level of geographical outreach (for non-profit or public organisations) to available budget (for business-oriented associations), and will be decided based on the organisations that will register.

At the end of this text you can find a list of organisations which signed up already.

Data protection policy
Except the information shown in the list of signatories, none of your personal data will be made public. The information you submit will be used by EUFIC and Ecsite for organising the workshops and by the INPROFOOD consortium for informing you about the project and inviting you to other INPROFOOD events. It will not be shared with any other parties. You can withdraw your consent to this any time. If you do not want to receive such information, please notify us when you sign up for a workshop.

These workshops are part of a series of almost identical scenario workshops held in 13 European countries. Altogether three series, that is: 39 workshops, will be held until Autumn 2013. The first series of workshops, i.e. 13 workshops, was held from October 2012 to February 2013.

On each workshop a descriptive report and on each series a comparative report will be published. The reports will be broadly disseminated to nonprofit organisations, governments and business associations in order to foster reflection and discussion. All participants will be named, by name and institution, but the individual contributions will remain anonymous.