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Community food stakeholder engagement: findings

Between spring and autumn 2024 we engaged with stakeholders from the community food sector, including the wider voluntary and public sector engaged in community food, to better understand what is needed to strengthen community food work across Scotland.

Through these conversations, stakeholders told us about their successes, challenges and barriers and ideas on how to address our current challenges.

We identified common themes and priorities including:

• Ongoing and recurring challenges of funding and capital resources.
• Importance of communication, collaboration/networking and leadership.
• Increased demand and pressure on staff and volunteers
• Recognition in the value of cash first approaches but issues in terms of capacity, funding and training.
• GFN: opportunity to take a whole systems approach but more guidance will be required.

Throughout this process we were met with enthusiastic, dedicated and like-minded people who were passionate about building a stronger, more resilient community food sector. We would like to thank everyone involved for their time and valuable input into this engagement process.

Next steps
PHS will use this information from our stakeholder engagement exercise to consider actions to support and strengthen community food and health in policy and practice, in partnership with our Community Food National Reference Group.

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