Capacity building for food justice in England: the contribution of charity-led community food initiatives

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the extent to which charity-led initiatives can contribute to capacity building for food justice in England. The paper draws on evaluations of two projects run by the charity Garden Organic: the Master Gardener Programme, operating a network of volunteers who mentor households, schools and community groups to support local food growing, and the Sowing New Seeds programme, which engages “Seed Stewards” to work with communities to encourage the growing and cooking of “exotic” crops. Based on qualitative data about peoples’ motivations for participation and the benefits that are experienced, we interpret these projects as examples of capacity building for food justice. We suggest that whilst currently depoliticised, the “quiet” process of reskilling and awareness raising that occurs through shared gardening projects could have transformative potential for people’s relationship with food. Finally, we use our findings to raise critical questions and propose future research about food justice concepts and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Food justice
• community food initiative
• capacity building

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the volunteers and households connected with MG and SNS who participated in our research projects. We would also like to thank members of staff at Garden Organic for their input and support. In particular Philip Turvil, Anton Rosenfeld and Sally Cunningham who have been instrumental in the successful MG and SNS programmes. We would also like to thank Jordon Lazell for research support and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Moya Kneafsey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8632-0176

Luke Owen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4376-4898

Elizabeth Bos http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9738-2073

Kevin Broughton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8992-4450

Margi Lennartsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8351-6744

Notes

1 The Coalition Government refused this request in spring 2015: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmenvfru/1148/114804.htm#a8.

2 http://www.homecomposting.org.uk/master-composters-mainmenu-36.

3 Local Food was a £60 million programme that distributed grants to a variety of food-related projects which were helping to make locally grown food accessible to local communities between 2008 and 2014, supported by the Big Lottery Fund and managed by The Wildlife Trusts (2016).

4 “Public Health England” (sponsored by the Department of Health) operates at the national level as a body to “protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities”. “Public Health” is also now part of each Local Authority in England.

5 In addition, the Government has also been trying to introduce legislation so that voluntary organisations which receive government funding will be far more restricted in using such monies for campaigning or lobbying: http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/lobbying-act.