Holistic Policy Design Workshop Empowers Ag Advocates
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
As part of the 2025 REGENERATE Conference, HMI offered a Holistic Policy Design and Analysis Workshop to empower agricultural advocates as they work to strengthen agricultural policies to support regenerative agriculture and local food systems. The facilitator for this course was HMI Certified Educator Joel Benson, who has a PhD in Public Affairs from the University of Colorado and who has worked on policies and projects for Horizon Organic, Nestle, and Marksbury Farm, and the state of Kentucky, as well as serving as both town trustee and the mayor of Buena Vista, Colorado for over 12 years.
Joel shared his many years of experience analyzing and designing policies for various entities and he said that many people don’t realize that policies are designed to solve problems most of the time, yet often the problem is not clearly defined. Additionally, because the policies are focused on solving problems, they create policies that lead to unintended consequences that cause more damage than good.
That is why Joel began focusing on helping people articulate what are the desired outcomes they want (flipping the problem to a solution) and then developing policies that help create the solution and desired outcomes. These types of policies tend to not result in unintended consequences and are often easier to get the commitment of the personnel or community that must administer and implement the policies. Read this blog to learn more about how Joel has integrated Holistic Policy Design and Analysis and solutions-focused policy in his work as an elected public official.
32 people participated in the Holistic Policy workshop and they influence 110,000 acres. Evaluations showed that 100% of the participants were satisfied with the workshop and would recommend the workshop and 95% said they would apply the ideas that they learned from the workshop. Additionally, 75% of the participants said they learned about new resources as a result of the workshop and 79% said that they would engage in more community and citizen work as a result of the workshop. Participants also said they were better able to identify the root cause of a policy problem, articulate problem statements, effectively analyze a policy, had improved their ability to design and improve policy, engage more effectively with policy makers and be better able to move a policy conversation to be solutions focused.
When asked what the most important things they learned in the workshop were and what they valued from it, they responded:
The importance of a values-based vision
Having more policy tools to use
The difference between the problem versus the solution tree
Understanding the policy life cycle
Switching from problem-centered to solution-centered strategy
Identifying root causes
The need to be inclusive and open-minded
Handouts will be useful
Root causes go deep! It’s better to improve a system over removing, destroying, or killing.
Thanks to the Thornburg Foundation for their support of this workshop.
