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Tractors toss topsoil into the air as I drive past miles of bare farmland. Debris billows from industrially grown tomatoes and settles among rows upon rows of walnut orchards that flank the fields of California’s Central Valley. Suddenly, there is a break in the monotony as Namu Farm appears as an oasis. Farmer Kristyn Leach kneels between chest-high cosmos flowers and rows of Korean Perilla (깻잎), deftly harvesting Sagwa Chamoe (사과 참외) melons from their sprawling vines. Her focused motions shift as she greets me, and with a quiet smile, she turns and beckons me across her farm to what I came here to see: rows of bushy plants heavy with chili peppers, gleaming red in the already hot morning sunshine.
“Seeds are storytellers, protectors of our traditions. In choosing to grow them and save them each season, they remind us of our collective memories and we commit ourselves to keep those memories alive for generations to come.”
- Second Generation Seed Collaborative
With practiced fingers, Kristyn gathers fistfuls of chilis. These are just one of twenty unknown Asian Chili Pepper varieties entrusted to Kristyn and Second Generation Seed Collaborative, a collective of Asian American growers devoted to the preservation and improvement of heirloom Asian herbs and vegetables. In so doing, the collaborative aspires to honor their lineages by offering high-quality, organically grown, open-pollinated varieties.
In the summer of 2019, the Collaborative received a call from Seed Savers Exchange, the largest private US seed bank outside of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). They’d discovered a collection of hundreds of seeds loosely categorized as “Asian Crops” which, if not ethically stewarded, would likely expire in their seedbank. Would Second Generation be interested in stewarding them as part of its new “rematriation project”? There was just one problem… There was little information about what the crops were, their culinary significance, their true names, or how to grow them.
“A lot of things came to Seed Savers at that time because [there was a boom of ] tourists in different parts of Asia who brought them back but the crops’ stories were anecdotal, or their names were mistranslated. So there’s no real knowledge of them.”
- Kristyn Leach, Namu Farm
Undeterred, the four young members of the Collaborative accepted the challenge. Of the hundreds of different Asian seeds offered to them, they agreed that chili peppers were a crop with which they all identified. And so, Second Generation’s Chili Pepper project began. They decided to divide the chili collection up and work together to uncover these abandoned varieties’ stories, while also exploring their own heritage. While little was known about the collection of chilis Kristyn selected for Namu Farm, they had something in common with her: they were originally from Korea.
A Korean-adoptee to the US, Kristyn spent her childhood on Long Island, New York – far from Korea and farms. As a young adult, she followed a circuitous path to the West Coast. She was employed along the way as a farmworker and manager, a tomato plant breeder, and a farm-to-table restaurant worker. Over time, Kristyn began to ask a profound question: Why were only certain culture’s culinary crops grown on the majority of farms, or represented at farmer’s markets? As part of her inquiry, she began growing different Asian crops on the farm she managed.
“Having grown up outside of Korean culture for so long, growing these crops felt like the safest way for me to explore my heritage. My relationship with those plants afforded me an entry point that felt more private and personal.”
- Kristyn Leach, Namu Farm
However, it didn’t stay private for long. Namu Gaji Restaurant in San Francisco took notice, and after they offered to invest and buy anything she grew, Kristyn jokes she “accidentally” started her own farm. Namu Farm was born, producing almost exclusively Asian crops.
“It felt easier to enter into Korean community events because I had something so tangible to offer,” Kristyn reflects. Indeed, people’s response to her crops helped her to instantly connect to them, she says: “Many people [in the Diaspora] have had a personal connection to these crops, having grown up eating the food, or would talk about their grandma growing it, which showed me the importance and role these plants played in people’s lives.” Kristyn started inviting people to see how the plants grow, and soon Namu became more than a farm: it is now a hub of community activity and relationship building. Kristyn explains, “I think that’s ultimately been the most rewarding part – being able to offer that to the community. It’s given a new sense of purpose to the farm.”
Plants are a great connector between generations and culture; they have the power to reawaken long-dormant relationships. With so little information about all the different varieties, the collaborative has been on an almost botanical detective-like journey. Collaborative members have been asking those at Chinese or Korean community centers and Asian markets, chefs at Asian restaurants, and even elders that they stop on the streets, “Have you ever seen this pepper?” Their answers help ascertain whether it is culinarily, medicinally, or spiritually important, and, based on that, what direction their breeding efforts should go to make each variety more true to its origin. Painting a fuller picture around these crops while connecting with their communities, Kristyn says, has been what’s important. This is the key to understanding the Collaborative—and to unlocking the mystery of these chili peppers.
Like the tomato (native to the Andes) is now synonymous with Italian food, chili peppers today are a source of national identity and the key ingredient in many quintessential Asian dishes, sauces, and even spiritual practices. Chili peppers were first recorded in recipes for kimchi in Korea around 1613. However, they actually originated in Mexico. According to Kristyn, elder Koreans would balk at even being asked to substitute one specific Korean chili pepper variety in certain recipes for a Thai chili, which would make the dish something else entirely.
“Peppers feel like a source of national pride. If I talk about what I grow on the farm, especially to Korean elders, and I mention chilis, they immediately get very serious and want to know, ‘but is that a real Korean chili pepper?’”
- Kristyn Leach, Namu Farm
Which is why the Collaborative is hoping to bring back the diaspora varieties that are almost impossible to find on the commercial market, or what some might call “lost”. But many of these so-called ‘lost crops’ were not “lost” by accident or even neglect, they were pushed to the margins by colonialization that favored a handful of crops over others—and obliterated the knowledge and the knowledge-holders that sustained them. This colonial legacy has been perpetuated in the modern age by corporations seeking to profit from the ownership and sale of seeds.
When Kristyn received the eight different Korean chili seed types, all she had to go off of was the vague descriptor of “IPK #___”, which refers, it turns out, to a large genebank in Germany. After two seasons of growing the different varieties out on her farm, she describes the different varieties as having “squirrely” genetics, and speculates they were likely side-lined during breeding efforts and then left sitting in genebanks.
This variety in her hands seemed familiar and important, so she chose to focus on it. Kristyn believes now that they are likely part of an abandoned breeding line of “Korean Hot,” one of the quintessential Korean chilis, which was bred as a cross between a Jeju island – Korean landrace with a variety of Thai pepper, making it thinner, narrower and spicier than other Korean chilis. “Korean Hot” however, in Korea is now technically owned and marketed by seed corporations, with its breeding divorced from its culinary context. “At first it was very disappointing, but at the same time, I was like, well that’s the case for peppers in general around the world. They’re really enmeshed in very dubious stories that are against all of these other kinds of favorite political forces.” In the US, there are some seeds available on the market but because the genetics are so variable, the populations evolved in very different ways, with flavors reflecting the growers’ preferences, without necessarily any connection to Korean food or culture. Kristyn aims to change that.
The Korean chili pepper no longer belongs to Koreans. “There’s a tension there. Korean people have this distinct sense that this is our pepper, that it’s really distinct to Korea, and it’s really essential. But at the same time, it also represents the hold that these bigger seed corporations have just in terms of who were the major players in the agricultural sector during periods of destabilization in Korea,” explains Kristyn. Korea’s two main seed breeding programs, Hungnong and JoongAng Seed were both acquired by hybrid-breeding giant Seminis in the 90’s. The privatization of public seed breeding likely paved the way for a rash of corporate buyouts. Kristyn shares, “the receipt of these cultivars predates the acquisition, but may have helped initiate it. So all pepper genetics now basically are really focused on hybrid seed production.”
Seminis was later acquired by Monsanto in 2002. So while Koreans may view chili peppers as a source of national pride and cultural identity, almost all commercial varieties available there are owned by US corporations. This means that most seeds on the market and peppers available at the store are hybrids protected by intellectual property rights, the profits for which are funneled back to the corporation. Korean farmers must therefore buy seeds every year rather than save and adapt them.
“I’d say peppers as a whole for somewhere like Korea have indeed been lost, but in an active way. People were really dispossessed of it at a certain point because of who ended up staking a claim to it.”
- Kristyn Leach, Namu Farm
But this is not just a Korean farmer issue. Today, it’s estimated that just four corporate firms control over 60% of global proprietary seed sales. This gives corporations the power to decide whether a variety continues to be bred and brought to market— or whether it is abandoned. Over the past two decades seeds all over the world, like these peppers, have increasingly been divorced from their culinary, cultural, and environmental context. Globally, neoliberal seed laws are also forcing the privatization of seeds, like UPOV 91 in Asia, which threatens peasant farmers’ livelihoods. As the global seed industry becomes increasingly consolidated, seeds are bred primarily for their profitability and yield on a global market – as opposed to qualities like flavor, texture, medicinal properties, ecological resilience, and cultural or spiritual significance. What’s at stake when this happens?
Kristyn sighs into her hands and answers that what’s at stake is “small farmers being able to carve out livelihoods, environmental degradation because those seed varieties usually need more [chemical] inputs. But when seeds are bred out by farmers, they endure stress or fit the needs of the farmers themselves for that particular environment, and they’ll have adapted to a climate that changes in non linear ways.”
At Namu Farm, in addition to growing crops, Kristyn has been breeding, adapting, and producing viable seeds of Asian crops for Kitazawa Seed Co. and Second Generation’s own seed line. The latter is where the peppers may be destined if they are successful. But reawakening a crop, especially one whose story has been lost, is no simple task.
Seeds are alive, albeit dormant, and must be kept viable; after a certain time, even in the best freezer in Svalbard they will simply die. However, it’s more than just keeping them alive. To remain viable, seeds need to be grown in conditions conducive to their original climate, allowing them to go through their full growth cycle and produce a substantial amount of harvestable seeds. Growing them in this way requires the knowledge to do so. Along with the seed’s story, this knowledge is usually passed down through generations of farmers who have traditionally stewarded and depended upon them. Those stewards are also acutely aware that seeds were never meant to be frozen in time with static genetics.
On a farm like Kristyn’s with open pollinated varieties, something magical will happen each season to these peppers. The plants are quietly adapting, storing new knowledge about the climate in their seeds. Of each crop she grows, certain plants in the same row will boast peppers with more seeds than the one next to them, which in turn may have a thinner walled, spicier fruit than the other. Or perhaps an unseasonable heat wave may dessicate 90 percent of the crop—but the remaining 10 percent will miraculously withstand heat and drought and still produce fruits. Like centuries of farmers before her, Kristyn selects the traits that she wants to carry forward into the next season, and that is how we as humans have stewarded our specific region’s food plant community towards flavor, yield, beauty and of ever more importance, resilience to climate variability.
What Kristyn is doing with these peppers— as peasant farmers across the world are also doing with what remains of the world’s unpatented agrobiodiversity—is increasingly a radical political act of seed sovereignty. “What we’re trying to reawaken is a much more collectivist view of ownership, and taking back breeding and selection again and making it not top down but from the grassroots up.”
The Collaborative’s stewardship is also linked to accountability to the communities and cultures from which the crops originate. As a seed breeder, Kristyn sees these abandoned pepper varieties as a project of defining what a Korean or “Asian” pepper really means when it is reconnected to the culture, culinary expressions and history rather than solely to its commercial value or her own preferences as a farmer. So they’ll be relying on their diaspora community as well as a network of other farmers over the next ten years of the project to help evolve the peppers. “I think the most exciting thing to me about Second Generation isn’t only the catalog we’re putting together of the genetic material of seed, but that we’re asking that we redefine our ways relating to the seed.” Stewardship means breeding chilis that reflect the robust culture they come from, while becoming stronger in the face of climate stresses – something a seed bank alone cannot do. Their efforts could have global implications as well.
Because so many of the non-hybrid varieties aren’t marketable anymore due to corporate domination of the seed market, peasant farmers tend to be strong-armed into growing only the mainstream varieties. “It’s a demented feedback loop that things in the US getting popular can help popularize things there.”
Since these peppers seem to be from abandoned lines, I ask Kristyn if uncovering their story is important to agrobiodiversity. Again, Kristyn sighs, “The loss of biodiversity that we’ve experienced in a relatively short amount of time is staggering, and it’s due to the power and gatekeeping that’s happened around genetic material. But I think the part that’s not acknowledged is that biodiversity only exists because other forms of diversity blossomed at certain points, [due to people migrating and breeding species to their tastes and needs in different regions]. Agrobiodiversity is also diminishing because these other forms of diversity are all being lost, whether it’s languages, ethnic groups, or even our food cultures becoming monoliths.”
Just like this collaborative of young Asian American farmers has been exploring its heritage on California soils, so too will these chili peppers adapt and become part of the diaspora, and part of a distinct environment and culture. They’ll carry their genetics, in addition to their stories and communities into the future. The story they tell is one of community, place, and intention that guides who, and what, we are destined to become. It is only when we protect that potential that our crops, our global agrobiodiversity, and these peppers will be protected from ever being lost.
“If people actually really loved and saw all these different species as their actual kin,” Kristyn reflects, “I think it would change everything.”
Humans are often defined by what they grow and what they eat. By rediscovering indigenous foods, communities safeguard their traditions and identity.
Food that is flavored with spices that are hot to the taste. Chili peppers are widely used in many cuisines as a spice to add pungent 'heat' to dishes.
Writer, Photographer
About
Lexicon of Food is produced by The Lexicon, an international NGO that brings together food companies, government agencies, financial institutions, scientists, entrepreneurs, and food producers from across the globe to tackle some of the most complex challenges facing our food systems.
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The Agrobiodiversity Channel was developed by an invitation-only food systems solutions activator created by The Lexicon with support from Food at Google. The activator model fosters unprecedented collaborations between leading food service companies, environmental NGOs, government agencies, and technical experts from across the globe.
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This online platform is years in the making, featuring the contributions of 1000+ companies and NGOs across a dzen domain areas. To introduce you to their work, we’ve assembled personalized experiences with insights from our community of international experts.
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We have no idea who grows our food, what farming practices they use, the communities they support, or what processing it undergoes before reaching our plates.
As a result, we have no ability to make food purchases that align with our values as individuals, or our missions as companies.
To change that, we’ve asked experts to demystify the complexity of food purchasing so that you can better informed decisions about what you buy.
The Lexicon of Food’s community of experts share their insights and experiences on the complex journey food takes to reach our plates. Their work underscores the need for greater transparency and better informed decision-making in shaping a healthier and more sustainable food system for all.
Over half the world’s agricultural production comes from only three crops. Can we bring greater diversity to our plates?
In the US, four companies control nearly 85% of the beef we consume. Can we develop more regionally-based markets?
How can we develop alternatives to single-use plastics that are more sustainable and environmentally friendly?
Could changing the way we grow our food provide benefits for people and the planet, and even respond to climate change?
Can we meet the growing global demand for protein while reducing our reliance on traditional animal agriculture?
It’s not only important what we eat but what our food comes in. Can we develop tools that identify toxic materials used in food packaging?
Explore The Lexicon’s collection of immersive storytelling experiences featuring insights from our community of international experts.
The Great Protein Shift
Our experts use an engaging interactive approach to break down the technologies used to create these novel proteins.
Ten Principles for Regenerative Agriculture
What is regenerative agriculture? We’ve developed a framework to explain the principles, practices, ecological benefits and language of regenerative agriculture, then connected them to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Food-related chronic diseases are the biggest burden on healthcare systems. What would happen if we treated food as medicine?
How can we responsibly manage our ocean fisheries so there’s enough seafood for everyone now and for generations to come?
Mobilizing agronomists, farmers, NGOs, chefs, and food companies in defense of biodiversity in nature, agriculture, and on our plates.
Can governments develop guidelines that shift consumer diets, promote balanced nutrition and reduce the risk of chronic disease?
Will sustainably raising shellfish, finfish, shrimp and algae meet the growing demand for seafood while reducing pressure on wild fisheries?
How can a universal visual language to describe our food systems bridge cultural barriers and increase consumer literacy?
What if making the right food choices could be an effective tool for addressing a range of global challenges?
Let’s start with climate change. While it presents our planet with existential challenges, biodiversity loss, desertification, and water scarcity should be of equal concern—they’re all connected.
Instead of seeking singular solutions, we must develop a holistic approach, one that channel our collective energies and achieve positive impacts where they matter most.
To maximize our collective impact, EBF can help consumers focus on six equally important ecological benefits: air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon.
We’ve gathered domain experts from over 1,000 companies and organizations working at the intersection of food, agriculture, conservation, and climate change.
The Lexicon™ is a California-based nonprofit founded in 2009 with a focus on positive solutions for a more sustainable planet.
For the past five years, it has developed an “activator for good ideas” with support from Food at Google. This model gathers domain experts from over 1,000 companies and organizations working at the intersection of food, agriculture, conservation, and climate change.
Together, the community has reached consensus on strategies that respond to challenges across multiple domain areas, including biodiversity, regenerative agriculture, food packaging, aquaculture, and the missing middle in supply chains for meat.
Lexicon of Food is the first public release of that work.
Over half the world’s agricultural production comes from only three crops. Can we bring greater diversity to our plates?
In the US, four companies control nearly 85% of the beef we consume. Can we develop more regionally-based markets?
How can we develop alternatives to single-use plastics that are more sustainable and environmentally friendly?
Could changing the way we grow our food provide benefits for people and the planet, and even respond to climate change?
Can we meet the growing global demand for protein while reducing our reliance on traditional animal agriculture?
It’s not only important what we eat but what our food comes in. Can we develop tools that identify toxic materials used in food packaging?
Explore The Lexicon’s collection of immersive storytelling experiences featuring insights from our community of international experts.
The Great Protein Shift
Our experts use an engaging interactive approach to break down the technologies used to create these novel proteins.
Ten Principles for Regenerative Agriculture
What is regenerative agriculture? We’ve developed a framework to explain the principles, practices, ecological benefits and language of regenerative agriculture, then connected them to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Food-related chronic diseases are the biggest burden on healthcare systems. What would happen if we treated food as medicine?
How can we responsibly manage our ocean fisheries so there’s enough seafood for everyone now and for generations to come?
Mobilizing agronomists, farmers, NGOs, chefs, and food companies in defense of biodiversity in nature, agriculture, and on our plates.
Can governments develop guidelines that shift consumer diets, promote balanced nutrition and reduce the risk of chronic disease?
Will sustainably raising shellfish, finfish, shrimp and algae meet the growing demand for seafood while reducing pressure on wild fisheries?
How can a universal visual language to describe our food systems bridge cultural barriers and increase consumer literacy?
This game was designed to raise awareness about the impacts our food choices have on our own health, but also the environment, climate change and the cultures in which we live.
First, you can choose one of the four global regions and pick a character that you want to play.
Each region has distinct cultural, economic, historical, and agricultural capacities to feed itself, and each character faces different challenges, such as varied access to food, higher or lower family income, and food literacy.
As you take your character through their day, select the choices you think they might make given their situation.
At the end of the day you will get a report on the impact of your food choices on five areas: health, healthcare, climate, environment and culture. Take some time to read through them. Now go back and try again. Can you make improvements in all five areas? Did one area score higher, but another score lower?
FOOD CHOICES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET will help you better understand how all these regions and characters’ particularities can influence our food choices, and how our food choices can impact our personal health, national healthcare, environment, climate, and culture. Let’s Play!
The FOOD CHOICES FOR A HEALTHY PLANET game allows users to experience the dramatic connections between food and climate in a unique and engaging way. The venue and the game set-up provides attendees with a fun experience, with a potential to add a new layer of storytelling about this topic.
Starting the game: the pilot version of the game features four country/regions: Each reflects a different way people (and the national dietary guidelines) look at diets: Nordic Countries (sustainability), Brazil (local and whole foods instead of ultra-processed foods); Canada (plant-forward), and Indonesia (developing countries).
Personalizing the game: players begin by choosing a country and then a character who they help in making food choices over the course of one day. Later versions may allow for creating custom avatars.
Making tough food choices: This interactive game for all ages shows how the food choices we make impact our health and the environment, and even contribute to climate change.
What we eat matters: at the end of each game, players learn that every decision they make impacts not only their health, but a national healthcare system, the environment, climate and even culture.
We’d love to know more about you and why you think you will be a great fit for this position! Shoot us an email introducing you and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!
Providing best water quality conditions to ensure optimal living condition for growth, breeding and other physiological needs
Water quality is sourced from natural seawater with dependency on the tidal system. Water is treated to adjust pH and alkalinity before stocking.
Producers that own and manages the farm operating under small-scale farming model with limited input, investment which leads to low to medium production yield
All 1,149 of our farmers in both regencies are smallholder farmers who operate with low stocking density, traditional ponds, and no use of any other intensification technology.
Safe working conditions — cleanliness, lighting, equipment, paid overtime, hazard safety, etc. — happen when businesses conduct workplace safety audits and invest in the wellbeing of their employees
Company ensure implementation of safe working conditions by applying representative of workers to health and safety and conduct regular health and safety training. The practices are proven by ASIC standards’ implementation
Implementation of farming operations, management and trading that impact positively to community wellbeing and sustainable better way of living
The company works with local stakeholders and local governments to create support for farmers and the farming community in increasing resilience. Our farming community is empowered by local stakeholders continuously to maintain a long generation of farmers.
Freezing seafood rapidly when it is at peak freshness to ensure a higher quality and longer lasting product
Our harvests are immediately frozen with ice flakes in layers in cool boxes. Boxes are equipped with paper records and coding for traceability. We ensure that our harvests are processed with the utmost care at <-18 degrees Celsius.
Sourcing plant based ingredients, like soy, from producers that do not destroy forests to increase their growing area and produce fish feed ingredients
With adjacent locations to mangroves and coastal areas, our farmers and company are committed to no deforestation at any scale. Mangrove rehabilitation and replantation are conducted every year in collaboration with local authorities. Our farms are not established in protected habitats and have not resulted from deforestation activity since the beginning of our establishment.
Implement only natural feeds grown in water for aquatic animal’s feed without use of commercial feed
Our black tiger shrimps are not fed using commercial feed. The system is zero input and depends fully on natural feed grown in the pond. Our farmers use organic fertilizer and probiotics to enhance the water quality.
Enhance biodiversity through integration of nature conservation and food production without negative impact to surrounding ecosysytem
As our practices are natural, organic, and zero input, farms coexist with surrounding biodiversity which increases the volume of polyculture and mangrove coverage area. Farmers’ groups, along with the company, conduct regular benthic assessments, river cleaning, and mangrove planting.
THE TERM “MOONSHOT” IS OFTEN USED TO DESCRIBE an initiative that goes beyond the confines of the present by transforming our greatest aspirations into reality, but the story of a moonshot isn’t that of a single rocket. In fact, the Apollo program that put Neil Armstrong on the moon was actually preceded by the Gemini program, which in a two-year span rapidly put ten rockets into space. This “accelerated” process — with a new mission nearly every 2-3 months — allowed NASA to rapidly iterate, validate their findings and learn from their mistakes. Telemetry. Propulsion. Re-entry. Each mission helped NASA build and test a new piece of the puzzle.
The program also had its fair share of creative challenges, especially at the outset, as the urgency of the task at hand required that the roadmap for getting to the moon be written in parallel with the rapid pace of Gemini missions. Through it all, the NASA teams never lost sight of their ultimate goal, and the teams finally aligned on their shared responsibilities. Within three years of Gemini’s conclusion, a man did walk on the moon.
FACT is a food systems solutions activator that assesses the current food landscape, engages with key influencers, identifies trends, surveys innovative work and creates greater visibility for ideas and practices with the potential to shift key food and agricultural paradigms.
Each activator focuses on a single moonshot; instead of producing white papers, policy briefs or peer-reviewed articles, these teams design and implement blueprints for action. At the end of each activator, their work is released to the public and open-sourced.
As with any rapid iteration process, many of our activators re-assess their initial plans and pivot to address new challenges along the way. Still, one thing has remained constant: their conviction that by working together and pooling their knowledge and resources, they can create a multiplier effect to more rapidly activate change.
Co-Founder
THE LEXICON
Vice President
Global Workplace Programs
GOOGLE
Who can enter and how selections are made.
A Greener Blue is a global call to action that is open to individuals and teams from all over the world. Below is a non-exhaustive list of subjects the initiative targets.
To apply, prospective participants will need to fill out the form on the website, by filling out each part of it. Applications left incomplete or containing information that is not complete enough will receive a low score and have less chance of being admitted to the storytelling lab.
Nonprofit organizations, communities of fishers and fish farmers and companies that are seeking a closer partnership or special support can also apply by contacting hello@thelexicon.org and interacting with the members of our team.
Special attention will be given to the section of the form regarding the stories that the applicants want to tell and the reasons for participating. All proposals for stories regarding small-scale or artisanal fishers or aquaculturists, communities of artisanal fishers or aquaculturists, and workers in different steps of the seafood value chain will be considered.
Stories should show the important role that these figures play in building a more sustainable seafood system. To help with this narrative, the initiative has identified 10 principles that define a more sustainable seafood system. These can be viewed on the initiative’s website and they state:
Seafood is sustainable when:
Proposed stories should show one or more of these principles in practice.
Applications are open from the 28th of June to the 15th of August 2022. There will be 50 selected applicants who will be granted access to The Lexicon’s Total Storytelling Lab. These 50 applicants will be asked to accept and sign a learning agreement and acceptance of participation document with which they agree to respect The Lexicon’s code of conduct.
The first part of the lab will take place online between August the 22nd and August the 26th and focus on training participants on the foundation of storytelling, supporting them to create a production plan, and aligning all of them around a shared vision.
Based on their motivation, quality of the story, geography, and participation in the online Lab, a selected group of participants will be gifted a GoPro camera offered to the program by GoPro For A Change. Participants who are selected to receive the GoPro camera will need to sign an acceptance and usage agreement.
The second part of the Storytelling Lab will consist of a production period in which each participant will be supported in the production of their own story. This period goes from August 26th to October 13th. Each participant will have the opportunity to access special mentorship from an international network of storytellers and seafood experts who will help them build their story. The Lexicon also provides editors, animators, and graphic designers to support participants with more technical skills.
The final deadline to submit the stories is the 14th of October. Participants will be able to both submit complete edited stories, or footage accompanied by a storyboard to be assembled by The Lexicon’s team.
All applicants who will exhibit conduct and behavior that is contrary to The Lexicon’s code of conduct will be automatically disqualified. This includes applicants proposing stories that openly discriminate against a social or ethnic group, advocate for a political group, incite violence against any group, or incite to commit crimes of any kind.
All submissions must be the entrant’s original work. Submissions must not infringe upon the trademark, copyright, moral rights, intellectual rights, or rights of privacy of any entity or person.
Participants will retain the copyrights to their work while also granting access to The Lexicon and the other partners of the initiative to share their contributions as part of A Greener Blue Global Storytelling Initiative.
If a potential selected applicant cannot be reached by the team of the Initiative within three (3) working days, using the contact information provided at the time of entry, or if the communication is returned as undeliverable, that potential participant shall forfeit.
Selected applicants will be granted access to an advanced Storytelling Lab taught and facilitated by Douglas Gayeton, award-winning storyteller and information architect, co-founder of The Lexicon. In this course, participants will learn new techniques that will improve their storytelling skills and be able to better communicate their work with a global audience. This skill includes (but is not limited to) how to build a production plan for a documentary, how to find and interact with subjects, and how to shoot a short documentary.
Twenty of the participants will receive a GoPro Hero 11 Digital Video and Audio Cameras by September 15, 2022. Additional participants may receive GoPro Digital Video and Audio Cameras to be announced at a later date. The recipients will be selected by advisors to the program and will be based on selection criteria (see below) on proposals by Storytelling Lab participants. The selections will keep in accordance with Lab criteria concerning geography, active participation in the Storytelling Lab and commitment to the creation of a story for the Initiative, a GoPro Camera to use to complete the storytelling lab and document their story. These recipients will be asked to sign an acceptance letter with terms of use and condition to receive the camera.
The Lexicon provides video editors, graphic designers, and animators to support the participants to complete their stories.
The submitted stories will be showcased during international and local events, starting from the closing event of the International Year of Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022 in Rome, in January 2023. The authors of the stories will be credited and may be invited to join.
Storytelling lab participation:
Applicants that will be granted access to the storytelling Lab will be evaluated based on the entries they provided in the online form, and in particular:
Applications will be evaluated by a team of 4 judges from The Lexicon, GSSI and the team of IYAFA (Selection committee).
When selecting applications, the call promoters may request additional documentation or interviews both for the purpose of verifying compliance with eligibility requirements and to facilitate proposal evaluation.
Camera recipients:
Participants to the Storytelling Lab who will be given a GoPro camera will be selected based on:
The evaluation will be carried out by a team of 4 judges from The Lexicon, GSSI and the team of IYAFA (Selection committee).
Incidental expenses and all other costs and expenses which are not specifically listed in these Official Rules but which may be associated with the acceptance, receipt and use of the Storytelling Lab and the camera are solely the responsibility of the respective participants and are not covered by The Lexicon or any of the A Greener Blue partners.
All participants who receive a Camera are required to sign an agreement allowing GoPro for a Cause, The Lexicon and GSSI to utilize the films for A Greener Blue and their promotional purposes. All participants will be required to an agreement to upload their footage into the shared drive of The Lexicon and make the stories, films and images available for The Lexicon and the promoting partners of A Greener Blue.
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