Duncan Ebata

Executive Director/Co-Founder

Duncan Ebata, Food and Narrative Facilitator

Duncan is deeply passionate about sharing the power of co-cooking, shared hosting and breaking bread together to bring out stories as well as deepen relationships with ourselves, each other and with the land. It has been his experience during a decade of facilitation that through the immersive, experiential learning process of collaborative cooking, hosting each other and sharing a meal in a safe space, it becomes easier for us to deepen relationships, build empathy skills, creative a culture of inclusion, learn non-violent communication skills, and re-author our ways of being together in our homes, with our children, and in our home and work communities..

As a Food Facilitator and Community Builder, Duncan has spent the last decade both innovating and creating healing community food spaces and food-based social enterprises in Nova Scotia and Europe at a variety of scales. From small community kitchen projects to large multi-million dollar projects, Duncan has led a wide breadth of food and narrative facilitation projects. Examples include: wellness cooking classes for Syrian refugee children in Germany, building Slow Food Youth Network co-cooking networks around the world, and growing local community kitchen mental health programming in Canada. Most recently, Duncan is grateful to have co-founded the Front Street Community Oven in 2017 to create a mental wellness and unity in diversity space in Wolfville through which he has programmed 90 co-cooking events in the past 3 years.

When not programming on farms, in community, or at the Front Street Community Oven in the past two years, you would find Duncan leading social innovation projects with How We Thrive, The Future of Food and The Narrative Project in Atlantic Canada. Duncan spent much of the past 2 years managing and co-facilitating the Narrative Project, an Atlantic Canada-wide project which brought people together on Zoom to collectively hold brave space to process the times, practice building empathy, learn new ways of being together, and shift narratives we hold that are holding back social innovation in Atlantic Canada. https://www.howwethrive.org/narrative-project

Duncan is constantly finding ways to create transformational and healing spaces in community that address upstream solutions for health, mental health, inclusion, food security, and the related intersectional challenges of today. Duncan has a Bachelors of Business Administration from Acadia University. Duncan is trained in and is an active practitioner of the Art of Hosting: Facilitating Across Divides, Systems Thinking, Holistic and Traditional Nutrition, Re-Authoring Narratives, Non-Violent Communication, Relational Leadership, Creative Co-Cooking,