Community Food Skills Working Group
This group exists to celebrate and nurture the many different skills that we need in order to enjoy a healthy, fair and resilient food system in North Lancashire. It facilitates strategy and collaborative projects that build our communities’ food skills and commonly held resources.
Think of ‘food skills’ and you probably think of learning to cook, or learning to grow food. These are both important and there are plenty of groups doing this in our area. However, other skills are also needed for a healthy food system to thrive. For example, small businesses need to know how to handle environmental health legislation and do their tax returns and newcomers need to know how to access affordable, ethical produce. So, as a group, we are very open-minded about the kinds of skills that we support.
This group meets every two months.
This group’s two year priorities:
Make visible/accessible all great work already going on
- Develop FoodFutures local food directory.
- Create content for FoodFutures weekly food columns in the Lancaster Guardian, blogs and case studies.
- Encourage people to use and care for the Sew and Sow Libraries.
- Pilot and develop a long-term funding strategy for THRIVE: North Lancashire’s community food magazine; facilitating citizen journalism and the telling of aspirational stories written and told by those with lived experience.
Secure funding for the following long-term roles/projects
- A Morecambe Bay Schools project – Where the Wildings Are – that complements the Morecambe Bay Curriculum strategy.
- A North Lancashire chefs and growers network and the co-creation of a North Lancashire Diet.
Map resources
- Identify good food mentors, trainers, influencers and champions, and a process for highlighting and connecting these people with local groups and projects.
Enable, promote or host training and skill share events around:
- Community leadership.
- Citizen journalism/telling your story.
- Setting up a community garden/project/food club.
- Permaculture design; seed saving and plant grafting.
- Growing your own and cultivating biodiversity – adapted for windowsill, backyard, alley, allotment and community growing.
- The North Lancashire Diet – cooking seasonally from scratch.
Enable, promote or host community events and celebrations, including:
- Community food conversations.
- Designing your 20-minute neighbourhood.
- Forage/nature walks.
- Potato days and seed swaps.
- Harvest feasts.
- Community cooking and community meals.
- Apple pressing.
- Guerrilla gardening.
Case Studies
Growing Food & Community Lottery Funded Training FoodFut...
