A citizens’ jury has approved local food growing as a key response to climate emergency and a farmstart project us being formulated.
The work of Food Futures – Lancaster’s Food Partnership, is exemplary in it’s co-creative approach and its commitment to looking systemically at problems and solutions and foregrounding inclusion and equality. As a result of considerable work over the last few years, Food Futures has created Our Food Futures – A Community Food Strategy for North Lancashire
They have 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.