Heart Group

This group’s two year priorities:

Capacity building

• Develop a 10-year funding strategy that diversifies FoodFutures’ funding streams and enables North Lancashire’s food strategy to be realised. This should consider funding for the long-term partnership roles, including: a network coordinator, marketing role, campaigns/events coordinator, working group leads and research coordinator.
• Enable and host a programme of capacity and health-building events, including: community food conversations, ‘designing your 20-minute healthy food neighbourhood’ and networking events.

Movement building

• Design processes that enable FoodFutures to grow into a decentralised, representative and resilient district-wide network, with cross-party and institution backing of, commitment to, and involvement in, a North Lancashire food strategy.
• Develop engagement strategies and pathways that cultivate empowered food citizens and community leaders, enabling a diversity of people to shape FoodFutures’ ongoing work.
• Oversee the creation of induction documents, templates, resources and processes that enable residents to understand FoodFutures and its core values, to get involved, to access support and to establish new good food initiatives in every neighbourhood.
• Enable and host a programme of capacity and health-building training for FoodFutures network, including: facilitation skills, collaborative working skill shares, food citizenship/community leadership training.
• Catalyse work that builds a local evidence base for policy recommendations and baseline that can then be used to monitor North Lancashire’s community food strategy progress.

Annual activities

• Oversee process by which a North Lancashire food strategy is reviewed and implemented – including a winter celebration/reflection event.
• Oversee process for agreeing a themed, partnership-wide, collaborative campaign.
• An action research project that is exploring decision making processes and the impact of FoodFutures’ work.