ViVid Viability
What Viability Means for ViVid
Viability seeks to consolidate the economic and structural foundations of CSA/LSPA networks. Numerous networks encounter difficulties in ensuring equitable wages for farmers and maintaining the economic sustainability of the network. By refining economic strategies and governance, as well as by promoting methods to uphold network coordination and cohesion, ViVid empowers them to become more resilient and better positioned to support farmers and consumers in the long run.
Viability of CSA and LSPA Networks
The aim of this guide is to improve the sustainability of CSA initiatives and their networks by facilitating the identification of priorities for collective action and foster the capacity of members to communicate effectively within their networks.
This guide equips participants to enhance their skills in strategically implementing diagnoses, planning the execution of concrete actions, improving interpersonal communication and active listening among members, and mastering various strategic tools for CSAs.
This module focuses on Viability. More specifically, we worked to empower networks to consolidate their economic, organizational, and strategic sustainability.
Coaching Session Highlights
Coordinating and participating in an LSPA network is not easy: funding is fragile, members come and go, and long-term strategy gets pressured by project and funding cycles. The ViVid Coaching Programme for Viability gives network coordinators, members and volunteers a space to contend with these challenges, and to be helped.
Between October 2024 and February 2025, four two-hour online sessions brought together members and staff from LSPA and CSA networks across Europe. Using a peer-coaching approach, each participant brought one real challenge, listened while colleagues offered ideas and care rather than expertise, then shared what mattered most.
The lessons learned in this testing programme (e.g., set clear priorities, learn honestly from past failures, design fair contribution models) now feed the ViVid Toolkit and training modules.
Webinar Highlights
ViViD Viability, Module 1 Webinar (French)
This webinar addressed the viability pillar of the project’s three-V framework (Visibility, Viability, LiVeability). The content in the conference addressed the holistic working definition of network viability (member wellbeing, internal and external recognition, advocacy strategy, financial strength, knowledge-sharing and training, communication and recruitment, and sustainable funding), condensed into five pillars: finance, governance, knowledge, human resources, and communication.
The participants engaged on the material via a tool testing format rather than a presentation. Participants from French, Belgian and Italian networks contributed to an opening word cloud, identified an individual viability challenge at the network scale of their choosing, and worked through around 35 minutes of Troika peer coaching in breakout groups.