Food Futures Local Food Fund report

 This is a piece of research that Fraser How and I carried out in 2008. The work was commissioned by Manchester Food Futures, in order to identify how best they could use the BIG Lottery Local Food Fund,  in order to support the community and voluntary sector in Manchester.

The report includes a mapping of local food projects in the area, along with an analysis of the relevance of the Food Futures strategy, and the Local Food Fund strategic priorities, to these projects.

It concludes with a series of recommendation about how Food Futures could use the local Food Fund to benefit the sector as a whole.

Presentation from Radical Routes 2009 Conference

Digital presentation from my presentation on Permaculture and Local Economics at the 2009 Radical Routes conference (.ppt format). Slides cover a wide range of issues, including the following: permaculture ethics and principles; the future of farming; Peak Oil , Transition Towns, bioregionalism, Energy Descent and carbon sequestration; Economic growth, fractional reserve banking and monetary reform; Co-operative economic solutions; and planning reform.   

Inspire Business Plan

This is a 136 page business plan produced by myself and Ed Cox in 2007/08 for the Inspire Community Centre in Levenshulme. The business plan formed the basis of a successful £300,000 funding application to the BIG Lottery Community Buildings programme, to regenerate the Inspire church into a community space.

The business plan inculdes a number of sub-business plans for the partners of the project, including ALL FM community radio station, and YASP young people's mental health project.

As you may have gathered this is not light reading.
 

Structural and Policy Changes supporting Third Sector food initiatives that provide Health and Well-being benefits

This paper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

I have produced this guidance note in order to outline recent policy changes, and new and emerging infrastructure that is supportive of local food projects that provide health and well-being benefits. It is aimed at third sector groups that are involved in different aspects of local food, from farm to fork, in particular those that may not consider themselves to be health based, but which are making a contribution to the national health and well-being agenda.

By ‘third sector’, I include community groups, voluntary sector organisations, charities, social enterprises, co-operatives, environmental, and campaign groups. Much of the information may also be of interest to mainstream organisations such as schools and PCTs that are engaged in food initiatives. Many food producing, and related land based projects do not traditionally consider themselves to be within the health sector. However there is an emerging evidence base to show that these kinds of projects provide significant health and well-being benefits.

This guidance is designed to show how such projects can benefit from the structural and policy changes that are taking place, and access the resources that are becoming available.

• Download PDF here.
• Download a .PPT Presentation on this paper here, which I delivered at the Permaculture Association council of management meeting in Spring 09.

[Please note that as of the date of publishing, this paper is already out of date. There is a new Department of Health mental Health Strategy called New Horizons that is currently out for consultation, which has a lot of relevance to issues covered by this paper. There is also a new government Physical Activity strategy that is relevant. An updated version of this paper, with information on these is likely to be published soon. In the meantime you can get a bit more info on these at my joblog here: http://targetwellbeingeventreports.blogspot.com (look for the articles: Blues Skies and Running With the Times).]