Professional Short Courses

As a professional working in agriculture or food systems, we want to support you to transform food systems and tackle the sustainable development goals.

In this course, you will learn how to use systemic and transdisciplinary approaches to transform waste into resources, close loops, create shared value and leverage interconnections to design interventions that build resilience.

This course will offer you the chance to connect with likeminded professionals from around the world and engage in interactive and creative skill building opportunities. You will have the chance to step back from silos, look at the big picture and understand connections. And you will have the space for personal reflection about how to apply these concepts in your life and work.

We are passionate about creating engaging and inspiring learning environments where you play an active role in contributing to your own learning. We will make use of a wide variety of tools and platforms to keep you energized and motivated through the four days, with plenty of space to regenerate.

The learning objectives for the course are as follows:

1. Discuss and examine the elements of agroecology, with a focus on circularity and resilience, to build sustainable food systems;
   
2. Apply systems thinking and transdisciplinary approaches to understand the system and design interventions;
3. Extend your professional network; and
4. Collaborate with colleagues from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds.
   

The Case for Tomatoes

A small portion of the program will include impulse inputs from experts to frame conversations. Most of your time will then be spent engaging with tools from transdisciplinary and systems thinking and applying them directly to a real-life case study on tomato value chains.

Originally from Mesoamerica, tomatoes are now consumed all around the world and are central to many cultures and cuisines. With the invention of heated greenhouses, tomatoes are now also grown all around the world all year long. The value chains that bring this crop of global relevance to our tables connect to many of the major social, political, economic and environmental challenges facing food systems, and tend to lack resilience in the face of shocks. Thus, the tomato value chain offers an excellent chance to ground the issues and make the topic tangible. Yet everything we will explore can be applied to other crops, value chains and systems.