Chloe Smee, programme lead at Sustainable Food Places, explains North Lancashire’s journey on the road to a gold award…
In your minds’ eye, picture a strawberry plant.
Notice how the strawberry plant continually sends out runners: they take the energy from the central plant and root nearby, then grow into plants which root and fruit independently.
The image of a strawberry runner is one I keep coming back to when I think about North Lancashire’s FoodFutures partnership.
Its strength and impact lies in nurturing its central energy whilst building capacity in people and organisations across North Lancashire’s food system so that they can connect, build confidence and carry good ideas further.
Sustainable Food Places, the national network of food partnerships (with 128 members across the four nations of the UK) has awarded North Lancashire a Gold Sustainable Food Places award.
Gold is the highest level of recognition in a national scheme that looks for evidence of lasting, cross-sector change across a whole local food system.
The award recognises years of patient, practical work and North Lancashire is only the eighth food partnership across the UK to receive this Award.
Our Gold application process asks for robust evidence to show how people and organisations across a place are working together to improve access to good food, support growers and food businesses, regenerate nature – particularly through nature-friendly farming and local food supply chains.
We want to see places that give communities the opportunity to shape their food system and get closer to the land, the growers and the businesses that enable us all to feed ourselves and our families.
A Gold Sustainable Food Place will have found routes to make people and organisations across their place understand how critically important food is to human and planetary health, and to use the tools they have to improve how and what we grow, cook and eat.
You can see those routes and runners at work in North Lancashire’s Food Circles.
At Stanley’s Community Centre in Morecambe, food clubs, growing, cooking, shared meals and volunteering are all being connected and are mutually reinforcing one another.
Members can enjoy a meal together and take an active role in shaping what happens at Stanleys – the menus, the cooking, the growing, the composting, the mutual support.
These connections give the community more human connections, skills and relationships to draw on as they develop their own work.
At the other end of the spectrum, we were impressed with the way Food Futures also helps bring food into the decisions made by larger institutions.
More than 250 people helped shape Our Food Futures, the area’s community food strategy, including growers, people with hard experiences of food poverty, health workers, teachers and councillors.
Lancaster City Council has formally supported the Gold application and have shown how, through the active work of the food partnership, its own policies and practices (from planning to procurement) have shifted to enable more food growing and a healthier local food economy in which smaller food businesses can access bigger contracts and thrive.
FoodFutures has worked with Lancaster University and others to examine how institutions such as universities and hospitals could buy food in ways that strengthen local producers and improve health and environmental outcomes.
That work takes care: changing purchasing practice requires clear-sighted evidence, relationships and persistence.
For Sustainable Food Places, how the partnership works matters just as much as what it delivers.
FoodFutures brings together growers, community organisations, food businesses, researchers and public bodies.
Its working groups and coordinating group draw on sociocracy: an approach that gives smaller groups room to act in an agile way while keeping decisions connected to a shared purpose.
Food Futures also thinks carefully about representing and included voices that might not always be in the rooms where decisions are usually made.
People elsewhere in the Sustainable Food Places network are looking closely at these democratic and inclusive ways of working, and at what they make possible over time.
Across North Lancashire, partners value FoodFutures because they can rely on it.
Growers and community groups find an organisation that listens and helps unblock challenges – like accessing land or having enough allotments.
Policy makers find thoughtful colleagues who do the groundwork, bring evidence and follow through the hard (and sometime boring work!) that is required to make changes that stick.
That diligence gives ambitious ideas a better chance of taking root.
The Gold Award celebrates the collective achievement of people across North Lancashire’s food system.
If you’re reading this – it celebrates you!
It also gives the rest of us in the UK-wide Sustainable Food Places network something to learn from: tend the relationships, make space for new roots to grow and your work will bear delicious, nutritious fruit.
