The Green Commodities Community serves first and foremost the dialogue and learning needs of its members. Every year, the focus topics and themes of the annual programme are selected by members.

Current learning themes include:

• Models and best practice for monitoring land use change
• Nationwide stakeholder engagement and coordination
• National farmer extension services and their financing
• Working with the private sector
• Linking jurisdictional and landscape initiatives to national level action plan and policies

The Green Commodities Community’s learning and knowledge sharing approach is delivered across many types of activities. Learn more below.

How to Run Highly Participatory Online Meetings

Do you want to know more about how we run highly engaging online meetings? The secret of a successful online meeting is to create frequent opportunities for meaningful engagement, and reward attentive participation. Learn more about how to achieve this in our Green Commodities Community Online Meetings Knowledge Base and Virtual Productions Teams guidelines, two comprehensive sets of instructions on how to run effective online meetings and the team you need to put together to succeed.

We have produced 2 short videos to provide insights from experts in running online conferences and workshops.

You can watch here (only available with a UNDP sign-in) the recording of a short 1.5-hour workshop on taking workshops and conferences online with Kal Joffres (Advisor, Strategic Innovation at UNDP) who teaches Design Across Borders at Stanford’s d.school, a class on doing co-design and human-centred design with globally distributed teams, and Simon Cooper, Global Communications Lead for the UNDP Green Commodities Programme. If time is an issue, watch this short 12-minute interview instead:

Interview with Kal Joffres on Effective Online Meetings

These are our most recommended tools to conduct workshops and conferences online and doing co-design and human-centred design with colleagues around the world:

— Zoom (the app includes polling, breakout rooms, and webinar features that you can enable from the Advanced Settings).
— Mural and Miro for online collaboration. You can also conduct some of the same activities by editing PowerPoint slides together in Office 365 or Google Slides. 
— Mentimeter, Kahoot!, and Sildo for audience quizzes, word clouds, etc.

In the second video below, UNDP Senior Adviser and Strozzi Institute Leadership Coach Lise Melvin talks about building the human factor into online conference design and shares valuable tips on how an effective facilitator can ensure diversity, inclusion and accessibility in online gatherings. Her guidance is especially useful for those looking to convert a face to face conference into an online version.

Interview with Lise Melvin on Taking Your Conference Online

Types of Online Learning Activities for the Green Commodities Community

 

Three types of online learning activities are offered to members of the Green Commodities Community, catering to different objectives and needs. They represent between two or three events per month on topics selected by member practitioners.

Dialogue Workshops: 90-minutes virtual events where dialogue prevails over one-way knowledge sharing. These include virtual break-out groups facilitated by expert moderators.

Workshop topics are based on case studies, challenges faced, and successful experiences gained in one country or one commodity sector. They allow practitioners facing comparable situation in other geographies (within and beyond countries) and commodities to make sense of how lessons learned can be applied in their own context and contribute to the further refinement of solutions presented.

The themes covered by these dialogue workshops are demand driven and selected by the Green Commodities Community members once a year through an annual learning survey. For example, in 2019 these include:  

o   Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Systemic Change	o   Land & Seascape Use and Managemen
o   Value Beyond Value Chain & Private Sector Engagement	o   Jurisdictional Approaches
o   Production Practices	o   Market Demand & Supply Chain Approaches
o   Financing for Change

 

Global Practice Webinars: Opportunities for partners, expert groups, academia, governments and companies to share their new approaches, diagnostic, analytical, synthesis, and communication solutions to scale up action and receive practitioners’ feedback.

The main themes covered in global practice in 2019 include:

o   Integrated Landscape Approaches	o   HCV Approaches
o   Technology for Monitoring and Change	o   Standards and Certifications
o   Transparency and Accountability	o   Mindfulness in Work

 

Training Webinars Series: Remote structured trainings on subjects required by practitioners, which place trainees at the centre of the webinar and use highly interactive techniques to improve knowledge retention.

The main themes in 2019 include:

o   Multi-stakeholder collaboration facilitation techniques	o   Engaging the private sector
o   National and sub-national commodity platforms	o   Farmer Extension Services
o   Gender mainstreaming	o   Land use change monitoring
o   Communicating impact	o   Managing child-project risks

 

Global Impact Platform

A new online robust global repository of evidence on the impacts and effectiveness of leading supply chain tools addressing key sustainability issues.

As part of the Good Growth Partnership, ISEAL Alliance with its partners WWF and Rainforest Alliance have created Evidensia, a global online database and knowledge platform for decision-makers to easily identify and understand what information exists about the impacts, effectiveness and business value of sustainability initiatives.

It includes evidence and information on a range of sustainability supply chain tools and approaches, including standards and certification, company sourcing codes and jurisdictional approaches.

 

Digital Platform for Collaborative Learning

Coming soon, a collaborative space accessible on both computer and smartphone to improve information sharing and connectivity between members of the Green Commodities Community.

We are working to create a user-friendly digital space where you will be able to:  

o   Access each other’s information	o   Access guidance materials
o   Consult calendars of workshop and webinars	o   Register in virtual events and conference
o   Network through messaging	o   Drive discussions
o   Share knowledge and best practices	o   Share documents
o   Share challenges and ideas	o   Ask technical advice
o   Provide feedback	o   Profile your work

 

Content Library

An extensive, easy-to-access library of guidance materials for registered members of the Green Commodities Community.

It contains a wide range of practical methodology and practical guidance documents related to:

o   Multi-stakeholder engagement	o   National Commodity Platforms
o   National Action Plan	o   Land Use Change Monitoring
o   Governance and decision making	o   Communications
o   Gender Mainstreaming	o   Monitoring and evaluation

The content library is constantly being upgraded and complemented by new valuable resources generated by the Good Growth Partnership related to Demand, Supply Chain and Financing.

Cross Commodity Advisory Group

Members from the Advisory Group provide strategic expert guidance on the thematic programme of the Green Commodities Community.

The group is made of one representative from each roundtables and/or specialized initiative on sustainable coffee, cocoa, beef, soy, cotton, wheat, rice, palm oil, etc.

 

Helpline

The helpline provides on-demand research support to help practitioners analyse emerging issues, find good practice examples, access literature reviews, policy positions, publications, guidance documents, connect to experts, get in touch with other projects, etc.

 

Knowledge Product and Lesson Learning

The Green Commodities Community regularly produces knowledge products in the form of cases studies, lessons learned reports and guidance documents from each of the thematic streams of the Virtual Dialogue Workshops.  

Moderators of the virtual dialogue streams capture lessons learned during the delivery of their annual programme of virtual workshops. Later, they gather all the knowledge shared in their sessions and produce a product for the benefit of all the members of the Community.

 

South-South Exchange

Coming soon: small groups of practitioners will spend time in immersion with their peers in other parts of the world in South-South Exchanges designed to share insights with fellow practitioners in similar commodity transformation endeavours.

Specific lessons learned from these South-South exchanges will be recorded during the visits and shared afterwards with the broader Community through a dedicated virtual workshop.

Individual Support

Technical coaching is provided by senior technical advisers to selected members of the Green Commodities Community.

Practitioners interested in receiving coaching are selected based on a call for application run once a year in September.

 

Bilateral Country Dialogue

Coming soon, facilitation of bilateral dialogue between government and buyers from production and consumer countries.

The Green Commodities Community offers UNDP’s convening power and the Good Growth Partnership’s ability to design, organize and facilitate effective workshops or summits between two countries’ main stakeholders, for example China and Indonesia on Palm Oil or Paraguay and Brazil on Soy.

 

Celebrating Champions

Coming soon, exciting awards for our most active Community members, as well as policy and industry champions!

Building on the spirit of the Carlos Díaz price awarded to two outstanding members of the Green Commodities Community at the Good Growth Conference 2019 celebrated in Peru, we intent to expand the concept of Celebrating Champions to also acknowledge the work of prominent policy and industry champions from all over the world.

 

Good Growth Conference

The Good Growth Conference , celebrated every 18 months in a strategically selected location, is an immersive learning experience which aims to inspire new understanding and foster meaningful global connections at the frontiers of agriculture and deforestation. This one of a kind gathering equips delegates with the network and tools needed to influence the way we produce, finance and demand agricultural commodities.

The next Good Growth Conference is scheduled to happen in 2021 in Asia. Stay tuned!