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Community-led Policy Innovation for Food-Growing: Learning from a networked approach in Southwark

Author(s): Richard Galpin, Pembroke House & Walworth Community Gardening Network (WCGN) and Les Levidow, OU

10/06/2024

The term ‘community food growing’ usually indicates a cooperative effort in community gardens, allotments, or city farms. Although food production levels may be modest, community food growing initiatives help build skills for sustainable food growing through knowledge-exchange, practicing cooperation, and building stronger social connections within neighbourhoods. Despite strong evidence about societal benefits, this has rarely brought about more helpful support measures for community food growers from local authorities, nor much prominence in Council policy.

In many places, a borough-wide advocacy group manages community food growing initiatives, stimulates new projects, links them for knowledge-exchange, and pursues more helpful support measures from the local authority. Our action-research project brought together five such Borough-wide advocacy groups. Our focus on ‘community-led policy innovation’ promotes a bottom-up process that expresses collective needs and builds group capacities for community food growers.

Our project developed the action-research methods and deeper knowledge necessary to inform effective action. Project-wide methods and results were summarised in a previous blog (Levidow, 2023). In many Boroughs, an advocacy group has pressed the Council to employ officers dedicated to community food growers. In Southwark a dedicated Community Gardening Coordinator was already in place, resulting partly from previous community-led action.

In 2018 the Walworth Community Gardening Network (WCGN) held a Southwark conference which generated 3 key demands from the shared concerns of community food growers there. One was a request for a single point of contact within the Council to coordinate community food growing (WCGN, 2018). The council responded by creating a Southwark Community Garden Coordinator (SCGC) post to liaise with community food growers groups, and included WCGN representatives in the 2020 interview process. The post was initially temporary and was made permanent in 2023.

Building collective capacities

In the first two years a priority for the SCGC role was creating new growing spaces on Council estates. This priority was aligned with the council’s Great Estates programme, providing extra capital funds. That programme funded the Allotment Expansion Guarantee, which pledged support for any residents who could assemble 5 individuals wanting to start a new garden. This meant to expand food growing spaces in areas which lacked an active Tenants and Residents Association (TRA), or where the TRA did not want to engage with food growing activities. New groups were supported through site visits, training for continuity, and encouraging group self-management. Through the expansion, residents developed new friendships, cooperative arrangements, mutual learning and attachments (SCGC, 2023). This support went far beyond providing materials.

People picking hops

Image: Hop picking with Alberta Fruit Commons, a community food growing project on the Alberta Estate, Walworth. The hops are prepared for a community brew day in collaboration with a local community pub group, https://www.richardgalpin.co.uk/alberta-fruit-commons. Photo credit: Alberta Fruit Commons https://www.albertatra.org/alberta-fruit-commons

Walworth Community Gardening Network originally advocated for creating the SCGC post, but the network’s influence became more diffused in subsequent years. WCGN did not give ongoing direction for the CGC’s brief. Its role was revived in 2023, when the OU project created the space for one of the network’s members to build stronger links between the WCGN and the SCGC. This coincided with a time when the SCGC post had just been made permanent; the SCGCs were evaluating how their role could best support community food growers groups in the longer term. When the Great Estates capital funding ended, this necessitated (and facilitated) a shift away from creating extra physical gardens, towards the skills and capacity building needed by groups for long-term sustainability. 

In 2023 the Council’s Community Garden Coordinator initiated two consultation events with community food growers groups. Attendees were drawn from across Southwark through the wide network that the SCGs had established during several years of work, with extra invitations to the Walworth networks by Southwark’s case-study leader. The consultation events were held within garden spaces by using group conversations and break-out sessions.  

This process structured a knowledge-exchange about obstacles and potential solutions. Participants grouped recommendations into three categories: 1. Support measures that the council should provide. 2. Initiatives that the garden groups could collectively organise, and 3. Initiatives that required a collaboration between gardening groups and the council. The support measures that the council should provide proved quicker to achieve. The Southwark Community Garden Coordinators responded swiftly by creating a Compost Doctor scheme, where groups could request an expert advisor to visit community food growers and advise on best composting practice. 

More ambitiously, the sessions highlighted the need for ‘cultural and systemic change’ so that improvements would continue and expand. As one outcome, the Council provided a training programme, which drew on community organising methods from the adjacent borough (HTCD. 2023). There are two more Working Group sessions planned for 2024, focussing on specific areas of common challenges for gardening groups. The first of these focusses on volunteer recruitment and group-building. This will be followed by a monthly Action Learning Group for community food growers, run in partnership with local charity Pembroke House as part of the Neighbourhood Food Model work (see below). 

Strengthening the Council’s commitment and community engagement

The OU action-research project also provided an opportunity to strengthen the Council’s commitment to community food growing across several policy areas. At a neighbourhood scale, local charity Pembroke House have been working with partners to develop the ‘Walworth Neighbourhood Food Model’ which seeks to support community food growers for a neighbourhood-scale food system (SFAA, 2021; cf. Pembroke House, 2022). At a borough scale Southwark’s Land Commission set out bold proposals for surveying available land and improving its use, including community food growing. The Land Commission recognised that the Walworth Model ‘should be resourced and replicated to enhance food security for Southwark’s diverse communities’ (SLC, 2023: 49).

SketchNote from Southwark Land Commission event

Image: Southwark Land Commission report (SLC, 2023)

Southwark Food Action Alliance is a partnership whose aim is ‘building a more affordable, healthy and sustainable food system for everyone in Southwark’.  SFFA worked with the Council to create a Sustainable Food Strategy which included measures to: ‘protect and increase food growing spaces in the borough through planning policy’. An upcoming action plan will further specify how this can be achieved. It also recognised ‘the need to strengthen the voice of local diverse communities in the work that we do’ (Southwark Council, 2023b: 13). It is part of a wider effort at ‘building trust through community engagement’ (Southwark Council, 2023a)

Community food growing found ready support amongst various Southwark policy makers in 2023. However, community-led policy making had the difficulty of convening food growers together with policy makers in the same space at the same time. Without including those who bring direct experience of food growing, policy measures do not take account of their experiences, nor offer appropriate practical or actionable objectives. Our project found that jointly convening growers and policy makers faced these challenges: 

  1. growers’ low trust that policy making would lead to tangible outcomes.
  2. the dedication and time commitment that most food growers have to their growing spaces, and 
  3. the location and time for scheduling policy discussion. 


Our project found the following partial solutions to these challenges: 

  1. Convene policy and support conversations within garden sites that growers feel comfortable and interested to visit. 
  2. Find activists who can bridge between policy and practice. (In this case community organisation and local charity Pembroke House played a bridging role between local growers and policy conversations by allocating time to a staff member who was already part of local growing networks, versed in policy conversations, and with an eye on upcoming potential policy levers). 
  3. Understand that policy conversations can be incremental, diffuse and networked. 

35_OKGrow-Aylesbury-estate.jpg

Image: Food growing on the Aylesbury Estate. A temporary 'meanwhile' use of land during Southwark Council's ongoing regeneration of the Aylesbury Estate. Photo credit: OK Grow

Networked policy conversations

Why might a networked policy conversation be necessary? Community-led policy innovation might reasonably expect a singular group of people in the same room at the same time to reach a single, unifying set of proposals. This is still an optimum outcome, as demonstrated by the WCGN 2018 conference outcome. However, to convene this requires many resources. 

An alternative strategy can be to convene a more networked, diffuse set of conversations. These can take place over a time period in smaller groups and discussions between growers. Information, insights and ideas can be passed between neighbouring growers and across the wider network. 

In healthy forest ecosystems mycorrhizal fungi make up a vast underground network creating symbiotic associations between fungus and plant. If we see the networks of food growers as representing such a network, with delicate and often unseen connective threads between nodes, we can adapt our strategies accordingly. Rather than treat growers as people that need to be corralled and organised into a single identifiable body, we could understand networks as providing a rich web of small interactions; these contribute to a larger, decentralised knowledge network within neighbourhoods. With the help of the right actors within the network, we can work in harmony with the everyday rhythms and rituals of community food growing. As a result, the strength and knowledge of this network is extended into wider policy without disrupting or reorganising the healthy relationships between growers in the network.

In those ways, the OU’s project has had modest success in helping to bridge the gap between policy makers and food growers, as well as supporting additional measures for food growing within various areas of Southwark Council policy. Furthermore, the action-research method provided the space to support and reflect upon a nuanced, networked approach to community-led policy-making with community food growers.

Find out more on the Challenge page.

References

HTCD. 2023. Community Organizing framework and toolkit.  Lambeth, London: High Trees Community Development Trust, https://www.high-trees.org /

Levidow, L. 2023. Community-led Policy Innovation for Local Food-Growing: half-year results, 
https://societal-challenges.open.ac.uk/blog/communityled-policy-innovation-for-local-foodgrowing-halfyear-highlights-of-a-pilot-study/9

Pembroke House. 2022. Transforming the food system in our neighbourhood,
 https://www.pembrokehouse.org.uk/transforming-the-food-system-in-our-neighbourhood/

SCGC. 2023. Southwark Council support for food growing and community gardening. Southwark Community Garden Coordinator, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GUz15yrJd6Ue6nG9782ooLhlA24zbHcK/view

SLC. 2023. Land for Good. London: Southwark Land Commission, 
 https://www.southwark.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/southwark-land-commission

Southwark Council. 2022. Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2022-27, https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s117146/Appendix%201%20-%20Southwark%20Joint%20Health%20and%20Wellbeing%20Strategy%202022-27%20Progress%20Update%20November%202023.pdf

Southwark Council. 2023a. Building Trust Through Community Engagement – Summary Report, https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s115557/Appendix%201%20-%20Building%20trust%20through%20community%20engagement%20Summary%20report.pdf

Southwark Council. 2023b. Good Food Southwark: Sustainable Food Strategy, https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s114662/Appendix%203%20Joint%20Equality%20and%20Health%20Analysis-%20Sustainable%20Food%20Strategy.pdf

SFAA. 2021. Walworth Neighbourhood Food Model, Southwark Food Action Alliance (SFAA), https://www.sustainweb.org/resources/files/reports/building-local-food-resilience-beyond-covid-19-southwark.pdf

WCGN. 2018. Walworth Community Garden Network, conference report, Southwark Council,  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OQNY-y-fcrM-uUlIbcvYfKav-dNNKBkQ/view?usp=sharing