Heart Group

This group’s two year priorities:

Capacity building

• Review and tweak information flows across the partnership’s working groups and clarify decision making processes, roles and responsibilities, including double links across working groups and who sits on the heart group.
• Develop and implement FoodFutures funding strategy that diversifies FoodFutures’ funding streams and enables North Lancashire’s food strategy to be realised. This should consider funding for strategic projects (including the Good Food Manifesto, Food Champion Network, THRIVE and Where The Wildings Are!), and long-term partnership roles (including a network builder, comms and engagement roles, working group leads and food justice partnership development worker).
• Enable and host a programme of capacity and health-building events, including: monthly skill shares, facilitation/ collaborative working/ food citizenship/community leadership training and skill shares,  community food conversations, strategic catalyst events and networking events.
• Facilitate an annual: spring into action series of events, a harvest celebration and winter reflection/ strategy events to enable ongoing learning, adaptation, connection and joined-up planning around the Our Food Futures Community Food Strategy for North Lancashire.

Movement building

• Facilitate North Lancashire’s approach to working towards a Gold Sustainable Food Places Award.
• Design and implement 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.
• Implement, review and adapt the ‘Our Food Stories’ communications and engagement strategy – cultivating pathways that empower food citizens and community leaders and enabling a diversity of people to shape FoodFutures’ ongoing work.
• Oversee the development of FoodFutures induction sessions for workers/new partnership members, the North Lancashire Food Champions network and Good Food Manifesto network as pathways that enable workers, residents and organisations to understand FoodFutures and its core values, to get involved, to access support and to establish new good food initiatives in every neighbourhood.
• Facilitate and catalyse research and work that builds a local evidence base for policy recommendations and a 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 reflection/celebration event.
• Oversee process for agreeing a themed, partnership-wide, collaborative campaign.