In 2019 a People’s Jury approved local food growing as a key response to climate emergency. Many of these recommendations relate to food quality, provenance and skills, zero carbon farms and minimising food and food system waste.
The work of Food Futures – Lancaster’s Food Partnership, is exemplary in its co-creative approach and its commitment to looking systemically at problems and solutions and foregrounding inclusion and equality. As a result of considerable creative and engaging work, Food Futures created n 2021 Our Food Futures – A Community Food Strategy for North Lancashire
Since the launch of the strategy have been coordinating themed working groups (Lancaster District Food Justice Partnership, Healthy Food and Environment, Community Food Skills, Economy & Procurement, Comms & Engagement) and have successfully pulled in significant funding for various pioneering projects including Closing Loops and Food Ladders – an approach to food justice that they are taking across the partnership using the Sustain toolkit.
We’re really pleased to be working with them again in 2025 on the Landed Community Kitchens project and visited in Feb 2025 for a workshop to meet the team and hear and help shape their ideas.
They created an inspiring and accessible Vision document which you can read here.
More than 250 people contributed to the words and dreams that make up the 2030 vision statement during November 2020-March 2021 – through online visioning activities, strategy mornings and community conversations. They have been shared by people with lived experience of food poverty, farmers working in the North Lancashire and Cumbria areas, school teachers and youth workers, food bank and food club volunteers, community food growers, hospital staff, academics, public health workers, city councillors, businesses, conservationists and members of the Lancaster District People’s Jury on Climate Change.
UAC has been contributing to this work in two ways so far: By supporting Lancaster’s Farmstart Coordinator to develop their Farmstart through our Farmstart workshops and a small grant, and by helping to start off the land audit to map out potential land for new allotments, market gardens, community growing projects and biodiversity corridors. This piece of work is building on the Hope Spots work of Friends of the Earth and Geofutures Food Futures and the Urban Revolution project at Lancaster University.
See more about the Farmstarts project here and about the mapping project here.
Lancaster’s Farmstart is called The Plot, earlier in 2021 they welcomed their first trainees!