Social Value and Community Food Projects
The Manchester Food Board Strategy aims to increase the quality and quantity of community food growing spaces and projects.
Community food projects are initiatives that aim to improve access to healthy, sustainable and affordable food, build community relationships and promote food as a mechanism for change within our society. Manchester has an array of food projects across the city, from community kitchens and cafes to community allotments, growing clubs and urban farms. These projects provide so many social benefits to communities across Manchester. The Manchester Food Board want to recognise these benefits and showcase why community action and a ground-up approach are crucial to change our food system.
Improved access to healthy food
In Manchester, there are many areas that lack access to fresh produce and healthy food options. Food deserts exist across Manchester with many people, often in low-income areas experiencing barriers to food access. Community gardens, community kitchens and pantries, food co-ops and farmers' markets allow better access and shorter supply chains from grower to customer.
Building community relationships
Food brings people together. Of course, this is a cliché, but community-building food projects are often under-resourced, and their impacts are misunderstood or undervalued. These projects aid social isolation and disconnect. They build relationships within the community and offer a space to share knowledge.
Promoting Sustainable Food Systems and small-scale growing
Community growing projects often showcase small-scale sustainable food production. Many community gardens and projects take from permaculture values and methods and alternate growing theories. They act as an opportunity to showcase agroforestry, companion planting, biodiverse organic, and many more. These provide an amazing opportunity for people to see sustainable production in practice and learn about our food system.
Manchester Urban Diggers (MUD)
MUD are about finding solutions to problems within Manchester’s local food systems. They advocate for food sovereignty, they provide a range of volunteering opportunities, such as a gardening club at their Platt Fields Market Garden site, well-being sessions and programmes where kids grow and cook their own food.
There is always a lot going on at the Platt Fields site. From winter markets to community composting. These events connect the food system to communities and educate people through this engagement, but also through their space and how they present their food and how they grow. It is so difficult to value the work that is being done by MUD and other community projects. They tap into communities that might otherwise not be engaged and provide a space for community to flourish. They grow using sustainable methods. They provide a space for makers and food businesses to promote their work. The list goes on.
Check out what else is going on through their instagram.
Social adVentures Salford
There are so many community food projects across Manchester that all of these impact areas and more. Social adVentures is a well-being social enterprise that focuses on public health and social care while also running childcare, training, a community gym and forest schools. All of this effort is accounted at £1.8m in social value per year! Good food is incorporated throughout these community offers, in meals but also in training opportunities or community kitchens.
Garden Needs is a centre where regular mental health horticulture sessions are run, including forest school training, woodland wellbeing and, green social prescribing and outdoor education services for schools. Garden Needs projects were shown to improve peoples’ social networks by an average of 45%.
Social adVentures also tackle health inequalities through various projects, including a weight management program, which provides free support and advice to people who are overweight or obese. In response to waiting times in the NHS for people to get support from nutritionists, Social adVentures shifted from a group-based format to offering 1-2-1 appointments with a community nutritionist. Since then, the programme has helped over 2500 people to lose weight and improve their health. In tandem with this health and vegan cooking classes are offered to share knowledge on how to cook a diversity of whole foods.
A food bank is run out of the community centre which helps those that are food insecure. There is a food club that provides people with access to local produce. Recently, the ‘Food Collective’ have collaborated with Tendrils Farms to deliver microgreens that are grown in a local vertical farm. These microgreens are harvested and sold on the same day!
It is estimated that for every £1 invested in these programmes, £10 is returned in social benefit. This is a huge impact, and these kinds of projects need to be understood and replicated in more spaces
Growing Manchester
Is an initiative aimed at promoting local food production and community food projects. The programme seeks to support the development of sustainable food systems through the provision of funding and support to community groups and community growing, urban agriculture and food cooperatives.
Various aspects of support is offered through the programme. From practical and theory-based horticultural training, site assessments and plans, community development support and additional resources, carbon literacy, beekeeping and carpentry.
MFB Strategy and community projects
In the MFB Strategy that will guide action on Manchester’s food system over the next five years, there is a dedicated aim to help community food projects.
- The MFB Strategy promotes community projects and access of these communities to disused spaces and land.
- Community food projects’ social value needs to be incorporated into the decision-making around these projects.
- Community food projects and spaces should be incorporated into new developments and encouraged through favourable rents and upkeep policies.
- Community food projects and spaces also should have the security of tenure over the base of the project.
Community food projects provide so much value to people’s lives, these organisations need to be helped and protected to continue the good work that is being done.