Resilient communities

Principles

Everyone should have an opportunity to develop food growing, cooking and buying skills that foster community resilience and individual self-reliance.

Planners should ensure communities can access land, buildings and other resources that enable them to take more control of their food.

Useful organisations and initiatives

Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens
As well as supporting community-managed farms and gardens across the UK, the Fed has launched a Community Land Advisory Service (CLAS) to help community groups secure access to land on good terms. CLAS works alongside other community access initiatives such as Landshare and The Place Station.

Focus on Food (FoF)
Focus on Food is the UK’s leading practical food education outreach program helping children, schools and communities learn essential cooking skills. Through toolkits - COOKITs - Focus on Food inspires children to learn how to cook and helps teachers teach the essentials of food safety and healthy eating.

Garden Organic (GO)
Garden Organic is a national charity supporting individuals, schools and communities to grow organically. As well as providing a range of courses, GO has developed a set of guidlines on organic growing, gives advice on organic composting and runs a Master Gardener Programme to promote local growing.

Food for Life Partnership (FFLP)
The Food for Life Partnership uses a holistic programme that links food education and practical involvement in cooking, growing and farm visits with changes to catering to transform school food culture. FFLP is now developing equivalent programmes for other institutions and communities.

Incredible Edible
Based on a successful model of providing access to good local food for everyone in Todmorden, Incredible Edible has developed an approach and a set of tools for communities to work towards greater food self-sufficiency. The success of their model has led to it being adopted elsewhere in the UK.

Farmers' market

Facts

  • Despite record levels of demand and the division of large allotments into smaller plots, between 1996 and 2005 the total number of allotments in the UK fell by more than 50,000. 
     
  • A rapid decline in cooking skills due to a lack of education, particularly among children and younger adults, has contributed to the UK consuming more ready meals than any other European country.
     
  • In 2011 over half of all brownfield sites in the UK were not being used, a total of more than 32,000 hectares of land that could be used by urban planners to produce food for the local community.
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