A free food magazine produced in Lancaster is holding a special event to discuss its future development.
THRIVE, which is distributed quarterly in cafes, food clubs, GP surgeries, garden centres and events across the Lancaster district, focusses on food from a community point of view, relying on ‘citizen journalists’ to produce much of its content.
Unlike many food magazines, THRIVE specialises in food from a community point of view – who gets to eat what, at what cost, and who produces it.
The event on December 9 at the Friends Meeting House in Lancaster seeks to explore how the magazine can develop in the future, and invite feedback from the people that read it.
For the last four years THRIVE has been funded by the National Lottery’s Climate Action Fund, but this funding comes to an end in March 2027.
One of the aims of THRIVE is to be a model of “community-supported publishing” where readers commit to help pay the costs of production so that people who can’t afford to contribute can still read the magazine for free.
Andi Chapple, one of the citizen journalists, who can also be seen delivering THRIVE across the district by bike, said: “The range of people in Lancaster – the places they have come from and the food and traditions they have brought with them – is one of the good things about the city for me.
“When I found out that an upcoming edition was having ‘culturally appropriate food’ as its theme I asked if I could research and write about East Asian food culture with another of the citizen journalists.
“We got advice from the team and they did the photography; we did the interviews and wrote them up.
“Once our work was finished the magazine’s editor went through it making improvements and everyone was happy with the result, including the people we wrote about.”
The first edition of Thrive was published in summer 2021.
It was born during the Coronavirus pandemic out of a vision for a ‘healthy, resilient and fair’ local food system by members of the FoodFutures North Lancashire network.
This strived for a system where everyone in the area had access to food they could afford and that would do them good, where more types of food was produced in the area and allowed producers to make a living, where large organisations supported all this by buying local, and where waste food, if there was any, was composted where possible to help maintain soil health.
They wrote Our Food Futures: A community food strategy for North Lancashire, which put out the first issue of THRIVE to introduce the food strategy and show readers what was already going on in the area from community growing to food clubs and solar-powered street food.
Since then FoodFutures has produced 16 editions of the magazine, with new ones appearing regularly since summer 2022.
Each edition has a theme – recent ones include Access to Land, Food and Health and What Food Means to Me – and regular departments including recipes, foraging, ‘news from the farm’ and interesting food projects from further afield.
It also covers local business start-ups and the work of the area’s food clubs and food banks, as well as supporting and tracking the progress of North Lancashire’s Gold Sustainable Food Places campaign.
Jim Greenan, citizen journalist coordinator for THRIVE, said: “The best part of working on THRIVE has been meeting enthusiastic people – volunteers getting stuck in at a food club, friends of different ages and backgrounds working together on the community allotment, kids thrilled at seeing their seeds grow.
“There’s so much good stuff happening around food in our area that most people don’t see, and that’s what we try to show it in THRIVE, to get even more people excited and involved.”
The event on Tuesday December 9 at The Friends’ Meeting House takes place from 6pm – 8.30pm and includes a free meal.
To book your place in advance, please visit www.trybooking.com/uk/FNRV.
From left, the THRIVE team: Jim Greenan, Fenny Suhono, Rachel Marshall and Andi Chapple.
