Food System Vision Prize

How might we design a nourishing food future for 2050?

In partnership with
Designing a nourishing food future for 2050
Designing a nourishing food future for 2050
Who can participate?

Ideas are invited from individuals and teams currently or previously experiencing displacement and registered nonprofit, civil society, community-based, and for-profit organizations working anywhere in the world. Learn More +

the opportunity:
  • Receive a share of $1 million in seed funding from GHR Foundation.
  • Join a BridgeBuilder cohort of innovative organizations working to address urgent needs.

Learn More +

What's Happening Now
  • Our Challenge is live! Submit your idea by August 17th at 5pm PST to be considered.
  • Submit your initial idea early, and our community team can support in evolving your proposal.
  • Sign up to receive email updates around the Challenge.
Participants were welcome to submit solutions to the Beyond the Bag Challenge through one of three submission channels. Learn more about each channel.

Background

The Food Systems Vision Prize is an invitation for organizations, institutions, companies and communities across the globe to develop a vision of the food system that they aspire to see in the year 2050.


Challenge Journey

1. Research

Sep 3, 2019

Oct 14, 2019

Current Phase
1. Research
The Research Phase was about making ideas better through collaboration.

Participants dove into the issue and shared their learnings with the community. At OpenIDEO, we believe that better ideas come from building empathy. Participants were encouraged to talk to family members, do online research, and observe out in the world.

Many hosted research events—from Peru to Hong Kong.

What happened

Participants took on a Research Mission, used our tools to learn, or lead a research event, then shared their insights by Thursday May 23rd at 9 a.m. PT.

Key Dates

Started on May 8, 2019. Ended on May 23, 2019.

Phase Closed
The Challenge

How might we design a nourishing food future for 2050?

Read The Full Brief

The Opportunity

Today, more than 70.8 million men, women and children are forcibly displaced worldwide. This new reality is global and growing. The opportunity for meaningful engagement is immense, and BridgeBuilder seeks to harness the hospitality and solidarity that lies within each of the seven billion humans on the planet.


Creating and adjusting to a new life is difficult, yet the journey is filled with possibility for a future. Those who have left home—too often labeled a refugee, migrant, or simply displaced—bring with them the gifts of their lives, resilience and imagination to new neighbors. We are these neighbors: the cities, faith communities, families, and new friends that have potential to accompany people experiencing displacement along their journey, from places of first refuge to newly adopted homes.


Whatever our differences, we are more connected than ever before. Our world is interdependent and we are experiencing this moment together. Solidarity must exist on a global scale, and BridgeBuilder calls upon all of us to see the promise of our neighbors anew—whether we are passing through, recently arrived in, or are an established member of a receiving community. 


With more people on the move today than in the past 70 years, and with women and children disproportionately impacted, diverse stakeholders must go beyond providing just a safety net for basic needs. There is immense opportunity to design approaches that enable individuals to create a life of meaning, filled with hope and dignity, and to support host communities in being their most welcoming.


How might we, as people on the move and neighbors, build bridges to a shared future of stability and promise?



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Opportunity Areas

Opportunity Areas are specific calls to action that guide the BridgeBuilder community. They serve as provocations that are intentionally aligned with our Challenge topic and are ripe for innovation.


  • The Full Human Journey: While narratives often focus on the moment of border transition or label individuals as simply “displaced,” a person’s true experience is more complex and nuanced than this. Diverse touch points along a journey might include leaving a country of origin, being on the move and crossing borders, arriving and settling in a destination country, or returning home. How can we design for these various stages of movement, and the complexity of decisions required to respond to the full human journey?
  • Beyond Survival to Potential: Ensuring each person has access to food, shelter, and water is necessary, but not sufficient. BridgeBuilder encourages innovators to go beyond these basic needs, to empower the entire human experience. With access to joy, hope, dignity and a platform for opportunity, those experiencing displacement can develop their full potential and invigorate the communities they are joining. How can the aptitude, strength and creativity of people on the move be fully realized for the benefit of all?
  • Equipping Diverse Communities: As people on the move navigate new spaces, they encounter many kinds of communities. Most host communities share a spirit of hospitality with newcomers, but may not feel fully empowered or supported to capably welcome new community members — or go beyond providing just the basic resources. How can transitional or receiving communities be engaged and equipped to foster their potential for hospitality and solidarity?
  • Other: Please Tell Us Why! Want to suggest ideas outside of our framework? Tell us how other ideas might achieve the impact we’re discussing, and how your approach works.
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BridgeBuilder Principles

A different kind of solution requires a new way of working, both within communities of focus and with each other. BridgeBuilder Principles should guide ideas to be designed not for but with communities of focus, just as they will guide the selection process.


Engagement Principles 

  • Meet people where they are. Geographically, socially, emotionally, culturally, and otherwise.
  • Build relationships. Build trusting relationships characterized by respect and compassion.
  • Listen deeply. Listen with humility. Treat peoples’ stories with dignity and respect. Recognize and honor lived experience as expertise.
  • Collaboratively learn and adapt. Respond to changing contexts and emergent learning through reflection, co-creation, and co-implementation with individuals, partners and communities.
  • Address Urgent Needs. Build and repair bridges between people, issues, and beliefs that promote meaningful engagement and greater social cohesion. 


Design Principles

  • Root Solutions in Community. Deeply root solutions in the context, cultures, knowledge, wisdom, needs, and aspirations of partner communities.
  • Promote Equitable and Just Systems.  Shift power structures, altering narratives, and moving the world in a more equitable and just direction. 
  • Promote and Protect Human Dignity. Go beyond meeting basic needs. Help people meet the needs of joy, hope, and dignity.

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The Prize

Selected Top Ideas will:

  • Receive a share of $1 million in seed funding from GHR Foundation.
  • Join a BridgeBuilder cohort of innovative organizations working to address urgent needs.
  • Take part in a kick-off workshop, during which they will meet other social innovators and further design and build their approaches with tools and expertise from GHR Foundation and OpenIDEO.
  • Receive partnership support from GHR Foundation, potential connection to other funder networks, and media exposure.

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Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria

Ideas are invited from individuals and teams currently or previously experiencing displacement as well as registered nonprofit, civil society, community-based, and for-profit organizations working anywhere in the world. If you are an individual or team without a registered organization, you are encouraged to post your idea early so the community management team can work to identify potential partners within the BridgeBuilder community.


  • Actionable and tangible: Idea must be actionable and build tangible results in the community of focus, rather than research, convenings, policy development, or advocacy.
  • Within scope: Idea must be implemented within a 36-month timeline and within a budget up to US $200,000.
  • Representative: Idea must show evidence that the voice and perspective of a person currently or previously experiencing displacement is part of the ideation, process, and project.

Learn more about our evaluation criteria for submission here.

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Additional Resources


Please review this list of Additional Resources to help you get started, or find downloadable versions at the bottom of this page.

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Leveraging Lived Experience: Our Design Approach

BridgeBuilder is prioritizing the voices, perspectives and ideas of people on the move. Diverse stakeholders who have lived experience, or have dedicated their careers to the topic of migration have provided feedback on program design. Throughout the Challenge, BridgeBuilder is committed to proactively seeking and removing barriers for the participation of people on the move through regional outreach leaders and localized community managers. When it’s time to select finalists and winners, currently or previously displaced individuals will play a key role as experts in analysis and review. When teams are matched with experts in the Refinement Phase, people on the move will advise and share feedback with shortlisted ideas.


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Our Challenge Process

During the Ideas Phase, BridgeBuilder calls on the global community to share approaches that bring people together to address urgent challenges faced by people on the move. The proposals do not need to be perfect or fully polished—in fact, early entry in the Ideas phase will allow you to iterate and improve your idea through community engagement. Throughout this Phase, participants are encouraged to include voices of people with experience of displacement in their communities to design ideas and provide feedback.


Currently and previously displaced people will help select a shortlist of submitted ideas to move into the Expert Feedback Phase, where teams will have the opportunity to be matched with experts with lived experience and from various fields to gather feedback and additional insights. After expert feedback, the Improve Phase gives each team three weeks to apply the expert feedback to their proposal, finalize and resubmit it along with a project budget.


Top Ideas will be announced in early November and receive seed funding and post-Challenge support from GHR, as well as connection opportunities with other BridgeBuilders and OpenIDEO.


Throughout this Challenge, BridgeBuilder is prioritizing the voices, perspectives and ideas of people on the move. Diverse stakeholders who have lived experience, or have dedicated their careers to the topic of migration have provided feedback on program design. BridgeBuilder is committed to proactively seeking the participation of people on the move and removing barriers through regional outreach leaders and localized community managers. When it’s time to select a shortlist and Top Ideas, individuals who have experienced displacement will play a key role as experts in analysis and review.

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The Sponsor

The BridgeBuilder sponsor, GHR Foundation, accelerates bold and better approaches that create conditions for the most vulnerable people to thrive. For 50-plus years, GHR has been pioneering design-build philanthropy as it collaborates with community experts to design and build opportunities and favorable environments for change to take hold. The Foundation sees BridgeBuilder as a powerful movement for good—a unifier and lever for social change, and a driver for bridging between people, networks, issues, and resources.

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Share ideas
Share ideas
Challenge Team:

Alex Nana-Sinkam

Global Equity Portfolio Lead

Isaac Jumba

Community Fellow

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