Our latest e-bulletin features information about our forthcoming webinar, Showcasing the Importance of the Community Food Sector, as well as news and events and information on topics such as food insecurity, Government policy, funding and training opportunities, food growing and more.
You can view the March e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin features information about, and a link to, our user insight survey, as well as news about the latest webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the February e-bulletin here.
The community food sector has a long history of helping individuals and families to access affordable, nutritious food. However, many community food initiatives achieve far more than this, using food as a powerful vehicle to bring people together, connect communities and meet people’s wider, holistic needs.
We have four new case studies on the Public Health Scotland website that shows how community food initiatives are using food activities to tackle poverty, support peer learning, bring people together to discuss the climate challenge and more.
You can view the case studies on the Public Health Scotland website.
Our latest e-bulletin features information about, and a link to, our user insight survey, as well as news about the latest webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more. You can view the January e-bulletin here.
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.
Our latest e-bulletin features some findings from our community food stakeholder engagement, as well as news about the latest webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the December e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin highlights the work of the Community Health Exchange (CHEX) in community-led health, as well as news about the latest webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the November e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin considers the use of Best Start Food cards in community settings, as well as news about the latest podcasts, webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the October e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin considers Challenge Poverty Week and shares cash first and income maximisation approaches used by community food organisations, as well as news about the latest podcasts, webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the September e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin considers connecting communities through food, as well as news about the latest podcasts, webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the August e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin considers cash first and income maximisation approaches used by community food organisations, as well as news about the latest podcasts, webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
You can view the July e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin highlights four community food regional events that we are supporting and run by Edinburgh Community Food (30th May), Glasgow Community Food Network (21st June) Community Food Initiatives North East – CFINE (28th August) and Lanarkshire Community Food Partnership (date TBC). Also news of what’s going on in the community food sector – events, funding, reports.
You can read the e-bulletin here.
Regional Community Food – Let’s cook up a storm!
📅 Thursday 30th May
⌚ 9.30am – 3pm
📍 Central Hall, 2 West Tollcross, Edinburgh, EH3 9BP
🎫 Book a ticket: https://regionalcommunityfood.eventbrite.co.uk
Edinburgh Community Food 🍓 is delighted to invite you to their Regional Community Food Conference. Join to celebrate, connect and collaborate with regional community food partners.
We’re hungry to hear your views and to be inspired! Let’s cook up new ideas for great partnership working. We are bringing community food organisations together to strengthen links across our network. Join us for an informative day with guest speakers, and interactive workshops.
Please spread the word 👋🏻. Places are limited but we’re keen to meet lots of community food colleagues from across Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife, Forth Valley and Tayside.
Our latest e-bulletin considers how the community food sector contributes to the Good Food Nation ambition, as well as letting you know about the latest podcasts, webinars and reports on topics such as healthy weight, climate challenge, food growing, food costs and more.
Published online today, this briefing paper will provide clarity on, raise awareness of, and support use of cash first approaches as the primary response to tackling food insecurity. This will include examples and clarity on how community food initiatives are currently supporting this, ideas on how to join with others locally to further support cash first approaches, and address dignity principles.
You can access the paper on the Public Health Scotland website.
Our latest e-bulletin contains news about building a community food network in Dumfries and Galloway, and the Good Food Nation plan consultation, as well as other news about diet and nutrition and research and policy, as well as reports, latest events and funding. You can access the e-bulletin here.
Propagate was one of three projects awarded funding from us last year, to support collaborative working and which Propagate used to expand the reach of the Dumfries and Galloway Community Food Network.
The Network successfully reached a wider range of community food initiatives across this rural area; raised awareness of cash first approaches to tacking food insecurity and worked hard to support further links between community food growers and community food organisations.
Our latest e-bulletin contains news about the Scottish Health Survey findings, and the Best Start Foods stakeholder events, as well as other news about diet and nutrition and research and policy, as well as reports, latest events and funding. You can access the e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin contains news about collaboration and network building in the Western Isles, and the Eating Out, Eating Well framework pilot, as well as other news about diet and nutrition and research and policy, as well as reports, latest events and funding. You can access the e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin contains a very short and easy-to-complete readership survey, news about diet and nutrition and research and policy, as well as reports, latest events and funding.
You can access the e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin has information on challenging poverty in Glasgow, diet and nutrition, research and policy, as well as news, reports, latest events and funding.
You can access the e-bulletin here
Many community food initiatives work in collaboration with others to address poverty. One example is Glasgow Community Food Network (GCFN), which brings together a wide range of community food initiatives from within the city, including those addressing poverty. GCFN is also part of the Glasgow Food Policy Partnership that aims to develop a co-ordinated response to food poverty.
Our latest e-bulletin has information on learning from collaboration, diet and nutrition, research and policy, as well as news, reports, latest events and funding.
You can access the e-bulletin here
Our latest e-bulletin has information on community food and local food partnerships, Good Food Nation, and the Scottish Government’s Cash-First fund, as well as news, reports, latest events and funding.
You can access the e-bulletin here.
In this blog post we show how the community food sector is playing a role in the development of Sustainable Food Places (SFP) in Scotland and how SFP aims can contribute to plans for Scotland to become a Good Food Nation.
The community food sector can play a key role in local collaborative work, and this is particularly evident in the development of Sustainable Food Places (SFP). Fifteen of the 32 local authority areas in Scotland have established SFP food partnerships and around half a dozen more are being developed. Nourish Scotland, who co-ordinate SFP in Scotland, expects the numbers of SFPs in Scotland to continue to grow.
The aim of SFP is to bring together partners from across the food system to address six key issues, one of these is ensuring that healthy food is available to all (such as by addressing food insecurity and supporting access to good food). Supporting a sustainable food system is embedded across all SFP key issues. SFP food partnerships always include local authorities and health boards play a key role too. For example, NHS Forth Valley’s Public Health Nutrition team were a key partner in developing SFP food partnerships in the area, alongside Forth Valley Food Futures and other organisations. The Public Health Nutrition team also have a long history of supporting community food activities in the area.
The work of community food partners is an important piece of the SFP food system jigsaw and some play a leading role by hosting the local SFP co-ordinator, such as Community Food Initiatives North East (CFINE), who host Granite City Good Food SFP, and Pennypit Trust (who run a wide range of community food activities) who host East Lothian Friendly Food Network SFP.
Glasgow Community Food Network and the Dumfries and Galloway Community Food Network’s role in SFP includes bringing community food organisations together locally to work on shared aims.
The Scottish SFP co-ordinators recently came together in Stirling, and Glasgow Community Food Network produced a 30-minute podcast from this event. The podcast records co-ordinators being asked about their overall local aims and how SFP ties in with Scotland’s aim to become a Good Food Nation which will require local authorities and health boards to develop local food plans. Speakers are from Nourish Scotland, Granite City Good Food, Highland Good Food Partnership and Argyll and Bute Council. Nourish Scotland also recently produced a blog post which shows how SFP key issues tie in with Good Food Nation goals.
We look forward to seeing how these areas of policy and projects converge and where there are opportunities to help the community food sector to flourish and support Scotland to become a Good Food Nation.
Our latest e-bulletin has information on cash-first approaches to food insecurity, and features the Scottish Government Towards Ending the Need for Food Banks plan, as well as news, reports, latest events and funding.
You can access the e-bulletin here.
The Scottish Government recently published Cash First: Towards Ending the Need for Food Banks in Scotland. In this blog post, we highlight a few examples of what community food initiatives are already doing to contribute to the actions in this Plan.
Larger organisations such as Community Food Initiatives North East (CFINE) and Lanarkshire Community Food and Health Partnership (LCFHP) have been central to supporting access to, and take up of, affordable good food for several decades between them. In more recent years, they have developed or become involved in local initiatives to try to address poverty.
CFINE provides a local ‘cash (and advice) first’ response to poverty through its money-advice service and has developed other programmes such as employability and skills development to provide a more holistic approach. LCFHP tackles poverty by being part of the North Lanarkshire Poverty Referral Pathway and supports the local community by running food activities, including cooking and weight management.
Edinburgh Community Food (ECF) is embedding ‘cash first’ approaches throughout its food projects. Its staff team have been trained by local partners Community Help & Advice Initiative about benefits and grants to enable them to pass on information directly to local communities. ECF also distributes Independent Food Aid network ‘Worrying about Money?’ leaflets as part of their food deliveries.
The Glasgow City Food Plan provides a more recent example of work to address the complex issues of our food system and food insecurity through city-wide collaboration. The wide membership of the Glasgow Food Policy Partnership group has pulled together the Plan which includes actions around developing ‘advice first’ and ‘cash first’ principles to help transition away from food aid referrals across the city.
Moray Food Plus provides an example of a project that aims to support people experiencing food insecurity by providing food aid and has developed a wide range of food projects, including food growing, cooking sessions and family clubs to complement this. It is currently developing its work to combat poverty by developing a money advice service.
A commitment to a ‘cash-first’ approach to tackling food insecurity is at the heart of a new Scottish Government plan to reduce the need for people to turn to food banks. The plan sets out nine actions which will be taken over the next three years to improve responses to food insecurity.
The role of community food organisations in promoting wellbeing being and providing person-centred support, including social contact, has been recognised within Action 4 of the plan.
More information can be found on the Scottish Government website.
Our latest e-bulletin has information on community food organisation activities, and news from UK and Scottish Government, new reports and latest events and funding.
You can access the e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin has details of our pilot learning collaboration project, as well as news on policy, funding, and forthcoming events and recent reading and podcasts.
You can access the e-bulletin here.
The University of Glasgow is recruiting a Project Manager for its newly developed Scottish Alliance for Food. The closing date is 3rd April 2023. Information about the post is available here.
Our latest e-bulletin includes the latest health, poverty and diet reports, what community food initiatives are doing as well as events, recordings and funding.
Our latest e-bulletin provides an update on how community organisations are adapting their cooking activities to the rise in energy costs, as well as the latest reports, webinars and recordings.
You can read our February e-bulletin here.
Our latest e-bulletin provides information about what’s happening in the community food sector as well the latest events, webinars, reports and recordings.
Update 30 November 2022 – webinar recording available
What can community food initiatives do to prevent food insecurity and promote cash-first responses?
In the last few years, many community food initiatives and food aid organisations have tried to get beyond providing food aid by redirecting people to services that provide income maximisation support such as benefits advice or emergency support.
In this webinar we heard from Diane Lambie from the Scottish Government Social Justice team, Fiona Rae from Community Food Initiatives North East and Chris Mantle from Edinburgh Community Food.
Please email phs.cfhs@phs.scot to be granted access to the webinar recording.
The bumper Summer edition of our e-bulletin is full of news, resources, events, and funding opportunities. It also has details of our forthcoming webinar, Cash-First Approaches to Food Insecurity.
You can access the e-bulletin here.
Our June e-bulletin covers food strategies from different part of the UK, consultations, webinars and funding. Plus links to research reports on subsidising fruit and veg, food safety and food aid and the Weight of the Nation.
You can access the June CFHS e-bulletin here.
Our May e-bulletin features a blog post from the Rowett institute – discussing how community food organisations managed to support families during the lockdowns. Also covered are how community food organisations are supporting Ukrainians arriving into Scotland, reports and plans covering Good Food Nation, obesity and food insecurity, as well as events, funding and consultations.
You can read the e-bulletin here.
David Watts and John McKenzie from the Rowett Institute, University of Aberdeen discuss findings from their research during the Covid pandemic:
In 2021, with Scottish Government funding, we interviewed staff and volunteers working to provide emergency food supplies to families with school-age children during the Covid-19 lockdowns. We had two aims. First, to understand how the organisations they work for had coped with the needs of families with school-aged children during the lockdowns. Secondly, to draw out learning points, examples of new and collaborative practice, and insights for policy-makers on what worked well and what could be improved in future emergencies.
We interviewed 47 people for our study, from 38 organisations throughout Scotland, in rural and urban areas. The fact that so many people were willing to participate in our study, despite having worked extremely hard for many months by the time we were able to contact them, enabled us to build up a large dataset and to ensure that the project met its objectives. We are very grateful to all participants for giving so generously of their time and for engaging so enthusiastically with the research. Our report has gone to the Scottish Government, where we hope that it will inform their ongoing development of the policies required to tackle food insecurity.
Interviewees highlighted that a major impact of the lockdowns was to exacerbate pre-existing difficulties for families with school-age children. This was not surprising, as less-well-off families are known to be more vulnerable to food insecurity when children are at home for long periods, such as during school holidays. However, what was new was that many additional families faced increased uncertainty due to the economic disruption caused by lockdown, such as redundancy and furlough. As a result, the need for emergency food provision grew significantly for many organisations. Our interviewees thought that many of the families who experienced food insecurity for the first time during lockdown were particularly economically vulnerable, as many did not know how to navigate the benefits system and had outgoings that benefits tend not to cover.
Nevertheless, many participants reported that their organisations were able to meet most of the needs of their communities as they received generous support, including grants, donations, sharing and volunteers, that were provided by other emergency food providers, businesses, local authorities and the public. However, some participants felt that they had not been adequately supported by the authorities and that their organisations were left floundering trying to meet the needs of their communities.
Our participants highlighted best practices in relation to the services and support that frontline organisations provide and the ways in which they operate. We collated and reported these to policy-makers and stakeholders. A key finding from our research is the importance of a ‘three capitals’ approach. The first ‘capital’ is of course money: a cash-first approach is widely recognised as essential to enable people to buy the food they need, free of the perceived stigma of having to visit emergency food providers. To some extent during lockdowns, the generosity of donors (as described above) helped to offset some of the more pressing economic hardships that were experienced by many, by enabling emergency food aid providers to meet increased levels of need.
In addition, the prolonged lockdowns highlighted the crucial role that family, friends, and the care sector play in providing ‘social capital’. Providing practical help and in-person support became difficult, and some interviewees felt that the inability to meet complex needs in person may have had fatal consequences for some vulnerable people. The third ‘capital’ (called ‘embodied cultural capital’) refers to people’s ability to develop and use life skills, such as budgeting, shopping and food preparation. Opportunities to develop new life skills, and to deploy the skills that people already have, were severely curtailed by lockdown restrictions. This, in turn, made some people more dependent on others’ help.
Our participants emphasised the variety of third-sector organisations that respond to food insecurity. Because they are so many and varied, responding to different types and mixes of needs in different areas, a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to policy development is unlikely to succeed nationally. Our data suggest that that flexibility and adaptability to local circumstances will be important. In addition, there may be continuing demand for third-sector provision, as some service users, especially those thought to be most vulnerable, are perceived by our interviewees to be distrustful of public sector bodies. We found similar mistrust in separate research with adults who have experienced food insecurity.
The organisations for which our interviewees work also tended to be economically fragile, relying on short-term funding, donations and public goodwill. One policy option may be for the Scottish Government to provide direct support that would enable all of Scotland’s residents to be food secure. However, given the distrust of public authorities noted above, there may be reluctance among some vulnerable people to use services provided directly by the public sector. This, when coupled with the flexibility and adaptability of organisations such as those whose staff and volunteers were interviewed for this study, suggests that any displacement of the third sector from the provision of support – whether in the form of economic, social or embodied cultural capital – for families with school-age children at risk of food insecurity should be planned holistically and undertaken cautiously.
John McKenzie j.s.mckenzie@abdn.ac.uk and David Watts d.watts@abdn.ac.uk
Here is the full report from the Rowett Institute: Emergency food provisioning during lockdown
Our latest e-bulletin tells you about our plans ahead as well as all the latest webinars, reports, funding and recordings.
You can access the April e-bulletin here.
Our March e-bulletin includes information about linking your work to local policy as well as the latest events, training, consultations and reports.
You can read our March e-bulletin here
Our February e-bulletin reports on responses to the Ending the Need for Food Banks consultation as well as letting you know about the latest reports and events. You can view the e-bulletin here.
Public Health Scotland has responded to this recent consultation, which closed on 25 January 2022.
You can read the response at the link below.
The CFHS programme has been working with the Scottish Government Diet and Healthy Weight team and community food networks to map strategic and practical support for community food activities across Scotland. The mapping snapshot is almost complete and we will update sections of our website with this information over the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, we found food networks or food partnerships in many areas across Scotland. Many of these are new or established Sustainable Food Places where agencies and community organisations come together to work across food agendas. Some Sustainable Food Places have developed food action plans, such as Aberdeen’s Granite City Food, Edible Edinburgh and Glasgow Food Policy Partnership.
Other local networks provide maps of how to access community food or food aid in the area, such as Inverclyde Community Food. Local authorities are involved in most of the networks and may lead them, such as Shetland Council. Others are co-ordinated by local Third Sector Interfaces such as East Renfrewshire Food Dignity Network.
You can see what networks are established near you on the CFHS website.
Quality Meat Scotland are offering community cooking groups in Scotland a £50 voucher in order to buy quality red meat to use as part of cooking classes. You can apply for a voucher here.
The Scottish Best Start foods programme is extending eligibility to British children aged under three whose parent or guardian meets the financial eligibility criteria but does not have a qualifying benefit due to having no access to public funds.
Our December e-bulletin includes a blog post from Edinburgh Community Food – encouraging us to respond to the Scottish Government consultation to End the need for food banks. There’s also information about a Best Start Foods update, veg pledges and the price of veg, funding and events.
In our guest blog post, Brenda Black from Edinburgh Community Food gives us reasons on why we should respond to the Scottish Government consultation paper on ‘Ending the need for food banks’ and gives us a few tips to help us.
How does the draft national plan hope to succeed in ending the need for food banks?
We recognise the important and laudable work being done by food banks across Scotland in their role of supporting people through acute crisis, and the passion, dedication and care of staff and volunteers. Ultimately, however, we want to move towards a society that has little-to-no requirement for food banks, where everyone has a sufficient and secure income that meets their needs, with food banks being a last resort for those in need. The main focus of the draft national plan to end the need for food banks is to address insufficient and insecure incomes and support people in a dignified manner. It aims to do this through fair work and wages, social security, and by reducing the cost of living. Where a crisis arises, the intention is to provide support by giving financial help (‘Cash First’), along with money advice. Where financial help isn’t immediately possible and food is required, there is a need to provide this in a way that ensures dignity, reduces future need, and minimises dependency.
Why we should share our views
Food is something that unites us all. It is also something that brings us together – the idea of ‘breaking bread around the table’ – and, as we at Edinburgh Community Food know, food can serve as a vehicle for supporting social connection, inclusion and our mental wellbeing, assisting in family bonding, improving our health and increasing skills. Having access to appropriate, nourishing food helps us all to live well and with live with dignity. We all know about food, and many of us in community organisations have experience of trying to support people experiencing crisis – we may have supported people with food parcels, referred people to get a food parcel, or aided those in need with relevant signposting. Indeed, we may also have experienced food insecurity ourselves.
Ending the need for food banks is a difficult challenge – and quite an unpopular idea in some circles, where it is seen as a ‘simple answer to a complex problem’ – but there won’t be one single way to address this. Complex problems require complex solutions; however, as we’re all passionate about food and how we support people we will all have many ideas that, if brought together, can make a real difference. So, if you respond to the consultation (and I really hope you do), even if you can’t answer each question, all these ideas will add up.
If you want to discuss the consultation and want to talk to a community food initiative, please contact us at Edinburgh Community Food. My email address is below. There are also contact details on the Scottish Government website if you have any questions about the process of responding to the consultation.
What things might be useful to think about?
When we plan how to make sure people can eat well, we might talk about the importance of access, affordability, adequacy, action and attitude. We can apply these ‘a’s to some of the plans in the consultation paper:
Access
The aim of the draft national plan is to ensure people have access to enough money – and food to spend it on – so they don’t need to resort to a food bank. The draft national plan outlines a range of social security payments that are available. These include ‘Best Start Grants & Food Payments’ and the ‘Scottish Welfare Fund’, amongst several others, and they can make a real difference. But how easy is it to find out about these and access them? Could access to welfare support be improved and how can we better support people through the processes of accessing funds? What is (if any) the role of community food initiatives in supporting signposting or access to welfare support? And what about access to healthy, appropriate food or the opportunity to develop food skills?
Affordability
Making sure we provide our household with a healthy balanced diet can be expensive, especially if we lack the skills to choose, prepare and store. A basic wage may not be enough to cover the cost of buying foods that meet a healthy balanced diet. How can the plan make sure that people earn enough money to buy good food? Is legislation needed?
Adequacy
The plan discusses the need for ‘holistic support’ to prevent future food bank use. We agree that access to cash does not solve everything and does not suit everyone, and that ‘simply providing food’ is not good enough. But, how can we ensure adequate support for people who have needs beyond immediate cash and food, such as people with mental health support needs, learning disabilities, experiencing domestic abuse, or recovering from addiction (as well as those without a bank account and no access to credit)?
Adequacy can also apply to when emergency food aid parcels (or food vouchers) are used as a last resort. How can we ensure the food provided (or cash level/use of voucher) is adequate (and acceptable) in terms of choice, good nutrition, culturally appropriate or suitable for dietary requirements? And that food is provided with dignity?
Attitudes
Attitudes towards people experiencing poverty may be better than they used to be; however, more needs to be done to continue the breakdown of stigma and encourage a more empathic approach, including around the conversations we have with our community members. This may help mobilise people and ensure more support for taking action.
Action
In the last decade, people have made a valuable contribution to supporting their communities by volunteering and providing donations to food banks. Many of these people have given more than just a food parcel: they may provide a social connection, or have supported or signposted people to other services. How can their energy, commitment and skills be used to support the ideas in the consultation plans?
Finally, we need to make sure action is taken after the consultation is over. Good ideas alone are not enough to solve the problem.
So, get yourself a cup of tea, have a read of the consultation paper, think about who you might need to speak to get help with it or to get their views, put some time in your diary for after Christmas to make sure it gets done by the closing date of 25th January 2022.
Brenda Black, CEO, Edinburgh Community Food
bblack@edinburghcommunityfood.org.uk
You can access the Scottish Government consultation on Ending the need for food banks here
Our latest ebulletin covers community food initiatives and COP26, Scottish Government consultations on Ending the need for food banks and local food, information about funding and events, and much more. You can read the e-bulletin here. November CFHS e-bulletin
The CFHS programme team has recently been working with the Scottish Government’s Diet and Healthy Weight team and others to discuss how the community food sector has fared over the last two years. The aims include revisiting the discussions from the Scottish Government’s Community Food Summit held back in autumn 2019. This work was paused during the pandemic.
CFHS is contributing to this work by mapping and putting together a snapshot of what practical and strategic support is currently available across Scotland to develop community food activities. Over the coming months we will share what we find with you.
Read the latest Covid-19 guidance for communities. Supporting Communities Safely features the latest information and guidance for community organisations adapting to life with Covid-19.
This advice has been produced by Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) and Public Health Scotland. It’s based on the most up to date Scottish Government guidance and best available knowledge about COVID-19.
We are delighted to say that CFHS are now part of the Diet, Physical Activity and Healthy Weight team at Public Health Scotland (PHS).
Sitting within the Place and Wellbeing Directorate at PHS, the team work strategically across the areas of diet, physical activity and healthy weight which, collectively, contribute to Public Health Priority 6 – ‘A Scotland where we eat well, have a healthy weight and are physically active’.
Too many people in Scotland face serious risks to health associated with poor diet, physical inactivity and unhealthy weight and those living in our most deprived communities are disproportionally impacted. The Diet, Physical Activity and Healthy Weight team provide national leadership and work closely with a range of partners across the public and third sectors to inform and influence policy and practice to help address these challenges.
This includes work to improve food environments and access to healthier food; ensure the provision of high quality and accessible support services for those who need them; and support local areas to take a systems approach to diet, healthy weight and physical activity.
We look forward to updating you with more information on the work of the team over the coming months.
Food Standards Scotland (FSS) has updated its Covid-19 guidance (9 August) for food businesses and their employees that informs on current advice surrounding Covid-19.
In March 2020, like many people, we, as researchers with an interest in food insecurity in the UK, were hugely concerned about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national lockdown on households’ access to food. It was clear from the outset of the pandemic that need for support with food access was rising and frontline responses were having to make major adaptations to their operations and working practices, all in the face of significant disruptions to the food supply chain. Governments, charities and businesses were all working to adapt to the unprecedented circumstances and to put different solutions and systems of support in place.
About the study
In this context a collaboration of researchers and NGOs, applied for funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), through the UKRI ‘Ideas to Address COVID-19’ grant call, for an 18 month research project to map and monitor these responses to risks of rising food insecurity during the pandemic. The project is led by Hannah Lambie-Mumford from the University of Sheffield and Rachel Loopstra from Kings College London, in partnership with Sustain and Church Action on Poverty. I, Katy Gordon, have also been working on the project from the start.
The project aimed to capture the interventions put in place across sectors but also to provide a source of data and analysis from which lessons for the future could be learned. The research project was designed to explore three aspects: one to look at responses at national level, one looking at a local level, and a participatory policy panel. The latter, in partnership with Church Action on Poverty, comprises a panel of people who have direct experience of a broad range of support to access food.
In July 2021 we published the first outputs from the local level work package. This part of the research is done in collaboration with the Food Power team at Sustain. The reports drew on data collected from case studies undertaken in 14 local authority areas across the UK, covering the time period (loosely defined) as the first national lockdown (March – August 2020). The reports published include individual write ups of eight local authority areas (Argyll and Bute, Belfast, Cardiff, Derry City and Strabane, Herefordshire, Moray, Swansea, West Berkshire) as well as a comparative report drawing on data from these areas and six more (Bradford, Edinburgh, Greenwich, Glasgow, Leeds and Merton). Across these areas a combination of interviews and online workshops allowed us to hear from 131 participants with frontline experience of responding to food access issues in their local area. Participants included people working in local councils, public health teams, third sector community food providers, and others. We are extremely grateful to all these participants for taking the time to contribute to the project, particularly when they were experiencing significant demands on their time.
Main research findings
The research looked at responses in the initial UK lockdown (March – August 2020). Corroborating what I’m sure many readers will know, the research highlighted the key role that existing third sector community food providers played in supporting people with food access during the first national lockdown. Participants described how the third sector responded quickly, despite the challenges they faced, many making major adaptations and significant overhauls to their operations to ensure they could continue to provide support to households. Some of the perceived benefits of having existing community food providers heavily involved in the response were that these organisations were already known in the community, people may have felt more comfortable accessing this form of support than that provided by statutory agencies, and such organisations were able to identify people’s needs and respond in a tailored and supportive way. However, it is important to note that at the outset of the pandemic response, these significant efforts were underpinned by concern about the sustainability of this work and there were ongoing concerns for the continuing increase in need as the longer term consequences of the pandemic unfolded. (Data from the Food Foundation shows levels of food insecurity continue to be higher than pre pandemic).
Scottish case study- Moray
As well as existing community food providers a number of other actors started supporting people with food access in response to the pandemic. Across the case study areas local councils played a significant role in the response although the form of support provided varied considerably. For example, Moray Council created a ‘flexible food fund’ that provided cash grants to households experiencing financial barriers to accessing food. The fund was managed by the Council’s money advice team and households were provided with two cash payments, once a month for two months. Recipients were also offered a wider suite of support to address the underlying financial difficulties, and receipt of the second payment was conditional on the recipients engaging with this wider suite of support offered. This response exemplifies a ‘cash first’ approach. The money advice team and the local food bank, run by Moray Food Plus, continued to signpost and refer households to each of their services.
Scottish case study- Argyll and Bute
Due to significant concerns about food supply shortages in the area, exacerbated by the rural geography, Argyll and Bute Council operationalised a large scale food box delivery scheme. Eligible households, including people experiencing financial access barriers, physical access barriers and families eligible for free school meals, were provided weekly delivery of both fresh and ambient food parcels. As well as providing this support to households the scheme was designed to support local food businesses. Wherever possible the food for the food boxes was sourced from local suppliers. Our research participant described this as being ‘for Argyll from Argyll’, exemplifying an approach that sought to support the local economy as well as local households. Other councils across the case study areas adopted different responses but these two alone highlight the range of responses put in place and the range of factors considered in designing such responses.
The benefits of existing networks and partnerships
Across case studies we heard of the key role that partnership working and collaboration played in responding to food access issues during this time. Participants considered this a key enabler of providing responses. Many areas already had existing food alliances or partnerships in place and these were quick to operationalise. In other areas new partnerships were formed. In the face of adversity this partnership working provided a source of celebration and participants hoped that new, strengthened and better partnership working across sectors would be one of the positive legacies from the pandemic.
Future research plans
As we move into the final six months of the project, we hope to provide an opportunity for local practitioners to reflect on some of the lessons learned as well as to look ahead. The next phase of the research will explore questions such as the legacy of the pandemic on the charitable food aid landscape, the key characteristics of successful partnership working, and the plans of local councils to support food access in the longer term. We hope the outputs from this further work will help to inform future responses and post-pandemic policy and practice.
The full reports from the local case study work packages including writes ups of Moray, Argyll and Bute, six other areas and the cross case comparison are available here.
Further details and outputs from the three work packages are available here. We welcome any questions, comments or feedback on the project – please do get in touch!
k.h.gordon@sheffield.ac.uk
Our latest e-bulletin is now available, with information about community food initiative’s summer programmes, and the latest webinars and reports to help you keep up-to-date with the community food sector. You can read the CFHS e-bulletin here.
In this blog post, Gordon Thomson, Manager for Lanarkshire Community Food and Health Partnership (LCFHP), tells us how LCFHP got involved in the ‘cash first’ approach in North Lanarkshire several years ago, and how this approach supported people during the pandemic.
LCFHP has run community food activities such as community fruit and veg retail, cooking courses and other training in North Lanarkshire and beyond for over 30 years. In the last five years or so, some of LCFHP’s work had extended to include mitigating food insecurity, such as delivering summer ‘holiday hunger’ programmes for children during the school summer holidays. LCFHP centred these programmes on games and fun activities as well as providing good food.
Tackling food insecurity and poverty using a cash first approach
LCFHP and other organisations, including North Lanarkshire Council and NHS Lanarkshire became concerned about the increase in food insecurity and what they saw as an explosion in the number of emergency food aid organisations being set up to mitigate it. LCFHP and others hoped to tackle the causes of food insecurity and to avoid emergency food aid becoming ‘normalised’.
In 2015, a Tackling Poverty Strategy was developed for North Lanarkshire which included the aim of promoting a cash first response – that is, ensuring people had access to money advice and emergency grants via North Lanarkshire Council’s Financial Inclusion Team and the Social Welfare Fund. (The most recent Tackling Poverty Strategy can be found here.)
A Food Poverty Referral Pathway was also developed to help ensure that people could more easily access these services. The Pathway is a two-way referral process: community organisations such as food banks or LCFHP refer people to the Financial Inclusion Team, who can either help people to access the Scottish Welfare Fund or/and money advice and other services such as housing. The Financial Inclusion Team will, in turn refer people to an emergency food aid service as a last resort response.
Key players within the Food Poverty Referral Pathway are food banks and community organisations such as LCFHP. Welfare Rights Officers/Financial Inclusion team staff can also be placed within food banks and other community organisations to give people more immediate advice.
The Food Poverty Referral Pathway successfully moved people away from using emergency food aid. Over 2016 and 2017 the use of emergency food aid decreased by 22%[1]. Welfare Rights Officers based in food banks also reported that most people they had given advice to had gone on to receive extra benefits or a grant[2].
Covid lockdown
In March 2020 when the UK locked down, some food banks in North Lanarkshire closed, yet more people required access to emergency food aid. Within a short space of time, new emergency food aid services or community shopping schemes sprung up and funding became available to support these. The local authority provided a Community Assistance helpline which referred people onto the support they needed during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, LCFHP stopped face-to-face activities and reconfigured its work to increase food aid services. Its work included a food aid delivery service to people who had been referred for this via the Community Assistance helpline, it also providing food aid when other community food aid organisations were closed.
However, LCFHP and others were concerned that some of the successes of the Food Poverty Referral Pathway were getting lost and that emergency food aid services were not being a co-ordinated as well as they could be. People were not always being supported in a consistent way, thus creating dependency on these services and food aid being normalised. Gordon initiated re-starting a food bank forum to try and address these issues. Now, most community initiatives are either using the Food Poverty Referral Pathway to support people or are planning to.
Over recent months, LCFHP has experienced a reduction in the number of people using its own food aid services, particularly by people who have experienced a short term crisis that can be resolved with a cash first response. LCFHP are now mainly providing food aid to people who may be: self-isolating, on zero hour contracts, or who may need more in-depth and longer term support around other issues, such as addiction issues.
Future plans
In the longer term, Gordon is hopeful that LCFHP can return to previous food activities, such as cooking groups (LCFHP are currently running these online) and other activities that focus on good food and that can help people connect with their communities and improve health. Hopefully also, the Referral Pathway will continue to be supported and is able to address people’s financial or other longer-term issues.
[2] The Good Practice Guide to Tackling Food Poverty and Insecurity in North Lanarkshire
The Coalition of Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) will be delivering and overseeing funds of £250,000 to BME organisations across Scotland to continue to deliver services to communities that have been impacted by Covid-19 and lockdowns.
More information and details of how to apply on the CRER website
Both before and during the pandemic, agencies and community food initiatives have collaborated to redirect people experiencing food insecurity towards ‘cash first’ options, such as welfare or financial advice.
The Independent Food Aid Network and partners have supported this approach by developing ‘cash first’ referral leaflets for 14 local areas across Scotland. These provide signposting information for individuals experiencing financial crisis. The most recent cash first leaflet was launched last week in Glasgow and a recording of this event is available on Youtube, which provides insight into the process of producing these leaflets.
The leaflets are available on the IFAN website and include some translated versions.
In this guest post, Dr Flora Douglas (Reader in Nursing at Robert Gordon University) discusses her recent research:
In late 2019 I was commissioned to undertake a short, focused piece of work to develop a better understanding of lived experiences of parenting on a low income in Aberdeen City, by NHS Grampian’s Child Health Commissioner. In addition to establishing how parents were managing on a low income, the study was also keen to find out how parents with young children were engaging with midwives and early years nursing services (health visitors and family nurses) in relation to disclosing financial challenges, with the aim of helping them maximise their household income through onward referral to financial advice services. This so-called Financial Inclusion Pathway has become integral to Grampian’s Child Poverty Action Plans and is in line with a Cash First approach to addressing food insecurity.
As a member of Aberdeen’s Sustainable Food City Steering Group, I had been aware that a significant amount of work had gone into trying to improve local access to high quality, but low cost food for low income families, through the development and introduction of a number of food pantries in the city in previous years. Existing evidence has told us that families with young children, particularly female-headed households, were most at risk from food insecurity, but were notably absent from foodbanks’ statistics in the UK. Feedback from food pantry staff had indicated that women with young families were engaging with food pantries (and their linked services) much more readily than foodbanks. So, we thought the city’s food pantries would be an ideal place to engage with families for this research study too.
So, in collaboration with colleagues at Community Food Initiatives North East (CFINE), we recruited ten parents (all women) to our study in late summer of 2020. Our initial plans to speak to parents earlier in the year were stymied by the first wave of the COVID pandemic, so because of this, participants not only shared their pre-COVID parenting experiences but also related their experiences of parenting, food access and their engagement with health professionals during that first lockdown. It is important to note that all our participants had a child under five and were living on very low incomes. A few participants worked part-time, but those who didn’t work couldn’t do so because of childcare commitments and the lack of local jobs that paid enough money that would cover their household and childcare costs.
We completed our report in January this year, and we welcome readers’ comments or observations on it. But there are four main findings that I want to spotlight in this piece that stood out for me in this work.
Firstly, I was really struck by the extent to which the £20.00/ week COVID 19 pandemic Universal Credit uplift had made to some of the parents we spoke to. It may seem like such a small amount of money to some people, but it clearly represented a significant change to the household budget for those families, particularly in relation to being able to buy food that parents and their children wished to eat, compared to pre-pandemic times. I think it’s important that we try to find out about the broader impact that this policy change has had on parent’s and children’s health and wellbeing throughout Scotland, and that we learn more from this national ‘natural experiment’, particularly given the disproportionate socio-economic impact the COVID pandemic has had on women in the UK.
Secondly, this study reinforced for me (again) how skilled and conscientious people who are food insecure are with their food resources. Shopping knowledgably and carefully, maximising food bought or received, and trying not waste food, along with batch cooking and ‘cooking from scratch’, emerged very strongly as key coping strategies in our conversations. This is something that I’ve picked up in previous research and have read in other’s research with low income groups. This evidence is at odds with some public and policy maker perceptions’ that assert that people living in poverty often lack knowledge and understanding about food preparation skills, and, planning and budgeting, and that they could do with some education to address those perceived deficiencies. Quite frankly, I was deeply humbled to hear our participants’ experiences and perspectives, as it seemed to me that our participants had much to teach many of us about how to save money – and the planet too, I suspect.
Thirdly, in relation to talking to health professionals about financial challenges, it was sad and disturbing to hear some participants express fear that if they did so, it could or would raise child protection concerns with the authorities. They believed this was a significant barrier to some parents disclosing they had financial problems, even if asked. At the same time, they viewed health visitors as health professionals that could really help first time parents, young parents and low-income families navigate the social security system to access more money for their families.
And fourthly, when we asked parents about what they thought would help with discussions about financial challenges with health professionals, they recommended that they (health professionals) should proactively raise and frame discussions about claiming additional benefits or seeking to increase their family’s income with benefits, as a positive thing to do, and not a negative thing or a sign of their being deficient parents.
Given numbers of people who have fallen into poverty because of the pandemic, and the projections of the numbers who will fall into poverty (the newly poor), or will be affected by very low income in the post-COVID world, this study suggests there is scope for health professionals (and community-based health professionals in particular) to play a key role in linking families with young children with help to increase their household income, and thereby reducing their need to rely on charity and food banks to eat, and avoid the nutritional and mental health challenges that this brings. However, this study indicates that there are some understandable barriers and challenges to realising the full potential of the Financial Inclusion Pathway. So, now we are currently undertaking a study investigating health visitors’, midwives’ and family nurses’ experiences of supporting low income parents with financial challenges, as well as conducting some more parent interviews where we hope to include more rural and ethnically diverse views too. We anticipate reporting on both studies towards the end of this year.
‘A qualitative investigation of the perspectives and experiences women and families living on low income in Aberdeen City associated with the introduction of the Financial Inclusion Pathway in 2019/2020’ is available here.
UPDATE 21 MAY 2021
A recording of this webinar is now available on YouTube.
With news that Scotland is expected to return to a system of local protection levels from 17th May, many volunteer, community and third sector organisations will be planning how and when to re-start their services. Doing this safely and in line with the most up-to-date guidance is essential, but the level of planning and risk assessment required might also feel overwhelming.
Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) and the team behind the Supporting Communities Safely resource will host a webinar session on Wednesday 12th May, 2pm – 3pm to provide further practical advice and an overview of the latest guidance. The session will focus on how to safely manage the use of indoor spaces in particular, covering issues such as physical distancing and ventilation.
Simone Janse van Rensburg tells us what she has learned from delivering their first few online courses – for parents with young children and two different weight management groups.
About the courses
Simone and her colleague, a cook tutor too, created some home-made videos of recipes they knew people enjoyed at face-to-face sessions and found easy to cook. Although making ‘food videos’ was new for them, they created something that demonstrated cooking skills and how to follow a recipe. These videos were shown during the online cooking course sessions and gave something visual to base a discussion around.
Participants had the option to cook along during the session or observe and chat then cook after. The duration of each session depended on the group preference and how the group were coping on that day or evening, but usually these lasted between 1 to 1.5 hours. Ingredients were delivered to participants by volunteers who then joined the online session a few hours later. This allowed for a socially distant chat or wave to create familiarity, which was especially useful for the first session.
A private YouTube link to the recipe video was sent out post session along with other information on eating well or adapted recipes. Participants emailed/messaged photographs, comments and other feedback from creating their own meals on their own at home.
Getting the dynamics right
Trying to recreate the atmosphere of a face-to-face cooking group has been tricky. There are no delicious cooking smells, participants cannot taste each other’s food and get that instant feedback from each other, and it’s harder to work out if participants need help or want to chat about something without prompting them.
So, what can be done to recreate a convivial, supportive atmosphere? Simone has found that keeping the online session informal and adapting to people’s needs as each session progresses has helped to create some of the feelings of group ownership and make people feel comfortable.
Not wanting to be ‘on camera’ was a challenge for some participants. Over time and with regular communication during and outside the sessions, participants eventually turned their cameras on at some point. Staying on the Zoom call a few minutes after each session also gives some people the chance to either speak to Simone individually or carry on with informal chat.
Adapting to the needs of the group has led to some useful conversations. In one session for example, a parent prepared the recipe ‘live’ during the session and got her toddler involved in some of the food activities, such as tasting or identifying the ingredients. This led to lots of chat between the parents on how easy or difficult they found it to cook a meal while their children were around and what they could do about it.
The approach seems to be helping people create a sense of community. Over time, people have commented that the social contact of the sessions, albeit as part of online course, has been an important social contact outside their social bubble during lockdown.
Keeping people involved
Simone has found the parents’ online cooking groups are better attended than the previous face-to-face courses. She speculates this is because it’s easier to be online at home when faced with challenges that might usually put people off attending a face-to-face course, such as feeling tired because a baby has not slept well, or not having adequate childcare.
Future plans
Simone and her colleagues plan to continue the online cooking courses for some time to come and run them alongside their usual face-to-face sessions which they are keen to get back to doing when it is safe to do so. They also started running the REHIS suite of courses online and these are more structured. More filming of cooking demos on specific topics will be done as well as gathering and creating more online resources.
To find out more contact simone@healthyvalleys.org.uk
Visit www.healthyvalleys.org.uk or find Healthy Valleys on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
Since March last year, The Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland (REHIS) has allowed REHIS course presenters to deliver the REHIS Elementary Cooking Skills course virtually, using platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Adapting training to a virtual platform is not without its challenges, so REHIS recently developed some additional guidance for its course presenters on how to do this. In this blog post, REHIS have helped us adapt this advice and this will be particularly useful for those planning ‘live’ cooking sessions and for those focused on developing and assessing skills and nutrition knowledge.
What has been successful?
REHIS Elementary Cooking skills course presenters have risen to the challenge of adapting their training methods and course materials to run virtual cooking sessions, so that participants are able to learn valuable cooking skills through making a variety of dishes in their own homes. These have proved to be a success – participants are still able to interact and chat with other group members as well as tasting and evaluating their finished dishes. REHIS Cooking Skills course presenters have shown that with careful planning and lots of enthusiasm it is possible to adapt and deliver worthwhile, quality practical training remotely.
So what do you need to consider when planning and assessing live online cooking skills courses?
Getting started
CHEX has developed a useful guide for taking training online and has lots of practical advice on delivering training using Microsoft Teams and Zoom. (This is aimed at HIIC trainers, but is useful for others) You can find the guide here.
Equipment, facilities and recipes
What equipment and facilities participants have may dictate which recipes or dishes you plan to make, unless you are able to provide these for them.
When planning recipes, you will also need to consider how participants will get the ingredients they need. If participants are able to source these themselves you could use this to develop their confidence and skills and incorporate it into learning outcomes, i.e. working out what ingredients are needed, costing and sourcing ingredients, identifying suitable substitutions (if required) and storing and organising ingredients before cooking. This could also complement learning outcomes on healthy choices, budgeting, food labelling, etc.
You will also have to consider what format the recipes will be in and how participants will get access to these.
Safety and food hygiene
It is advisable to go over safety and food hygiene protocols at the start of each session as you would in a face-to-face session. This is obviously more difficult to do in a virtual session, but you should ensure that all participants are aware of and demonstrate the main principles of personal hygiene, food safety (during food preparation, cooking and storage) and the safe use of equipment.
The format of the session
Teaching methods
You may wish to include demonstrations of techniques, etc. while participants watch (remember to have the camera pointing at your hands to show what you are doing, not your face and to put it back to your face when you are talking). This can be done ‘live’ with the group watching or you could show pre-recorded videos within the session. This may be particularly useful in the first few sessions.
You could also cook alongside participants with everyone making the dish at the same time. However, this will make it less possible to observe participants cooking so if you aim to assess or evaluate participants’ skills, you could either do this in a separate session or have someone else observing participants while you cook.
You may also wish to show video recordings covering some topics to break up each session a bit, for example, you could show a video on food safety in the kitchen to introduce the topic or to reinforce prior learning.
Assessing skills, knowledge and the quality of the prepared recipe
As with a face-to-face session, it is possible to assess skills by observing participants’ cooking techniques during virtual sessions.
You will also be observing and checking they are using hygienic methods and suitable equipment and are able to follow the recipe and measure things out correctly.
You could also use practical activities, question and answer sessions or a quiz to assess participants’ knowledge and understanding throughout the course. These could also be a useful way to determine their understanding of cooking and food preparation terms and can be done verbally or by showing each question on screen and discussing the answers.
You could carry out more formal assessments as a group, in breakout rooms or by giving participants a time slot to do this on a one-to-one basis with you, or a combination of these.
Participants could record themselves. For example, they could remake a dish between sessions or try a new recipe which they could record. It is a good idea to encourage them to talk through what they are doing and why.
If you are assessing skills, make sure you give feedback to participants throughout the course so that they can work on the skills they wish to develop.
Participants could evaluate their own recipe by describing and rating their dish. Or, if they have someone else in the household, they could ask them to taste and rate the food in addition or instead. They could do this verbally or they could fill out a taste rating card. (You could also collect this and use this as part of any evaluation).
Participants could also take a picture of their finished dish.
Interactive training
You may wish to incorporate some interactive activities to supplement the practical cooking and to cover nutrition learning. These could also be used to assess participants’ knowledge and understanding.
How to use (interactive) training aids on a virtual platform
There are several ways you could do this:
1) Breakout rooms (remember if you have the activity on the screen, this can’t be seen once you go into a breakout room).
2) Links to activities/websites etc. in the chat box (though you can’t then see them doing it).
3) Share your screen while you do an activity or talk through it as a group
4) Send out a printed copy of an activity in the pre course information for use during the session.
Interactive aids and other resources
The resources below can be adapted to online activities:
Eatwell Guide
Food Standards Scotland Interactive Eatwell guide:
http://fss-eatwellguide.scot/
Eatwell Challenge (aimed at children and young people)
https://www.foodafactoflife.org.uk/11-14-years/healthy-eating/eat-well/#EC
The NHS choices Eatwell Guide and Eatwell pages are not interactive, but include a wide range of resources that could be adapted: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-eatwell-guide/
Food a Fact of Life interactive resources
These are aimed at children and young people and include a wide range of videos, quizzes and interactive games.
Food a Fact of Life Interactive resources
World Cancer Research Fund
Has a quiz about sugar: ‘Are you sugar savvy?’
https://www.wcrf-uk.org/sites/default/files/HP-Sugar-in-drinks-2020-WEB.pdf
Food Standards Scotland (FSS)
FSS has interactive resources aimed at young people in secondary school:
Food safety & healthy eating education | Food Standards Scotland | Food Standards Scotland
About the REHIS Elementary Cooking Skills course
The REHIS Elementary Cooking Skills course is a flexible, short course (min 6 hours) suitable for anyone with an interest in food and cooking with little or no cooking experience. It provides participants with basic cooking skills, increasing their confidence, skills and knowledge of basic food preparation, basic cooking and presentation, food safety and safe and hygienic practices. The course has been independently rated on the Scottish Credit Qualifications Framework (SCQF) at Level 4 with 1 credit.
The course syllabus can be found here.
For more information on Elementary Cooking Skills or for details of how to become a registered cooking skills centre, please contact mjb@rehis.com
Our latest e-bulletin is now available, giving you information about how community food initiatives are adapting to Covid and planning for recovery. There is information about running online cooking courses, pantries and the latest reports, videos and webinars. You can read the e-bulletin here.
Kirstin Wilson, a student at Abertay University, has developed this survey as part of her dissertation, to find out the views of participants attending online cooking courses. Kirstin is looking for help from community organisations running online cooking to encourage course participants to complete this survey.
The survey takes the form of an anonymous online questionnaire that will take no longer than 10 minutes to complete. This questionnaire is being used to collect data on how to improve and develop online cooking programmes and include information that would be of the most benefit. The questionnaire has a mix of multiple choice and written answers with space at the end to add your own comments. There are some general questions (age, gender, income, etc) some of which are optional, as well as some questions on participants’ cooking skills and knowledge of nutrition, and on how they found the experience of taking part in online cooking classes.
Full information on how the data will be used and retained can be found in the introduction to the questionnaire.
You can access the survey at the link below. The survey is open until the end of March.
Adapting community cooking programmes for online delivery – questionnaire.
For more information, please contact Kirstin Wilson: 1703457@abertay.ac.uk
Edinburgh Community Food (ECF) and Greener Kirkcaldy, both usually run regular face-to-face cooking courses. They now deliver these online and gave us some tips and ideas based on what they have learnt.
Greener Kirkcaldy’s initial focus last year was to provide easy-to-follow recipes by providing cooking demos on their YouTube channel. They also tried live question and answer sessions with their Community Chef, but these were less successful. Next, they piloted events delivered over two sessions. This consisted of: an interactive online session; showing a pre-recorded cooking demo followed by a question and answer session with the chef. This format worked well and is the approach they plan to continue with. Greener Kirkcaldy have also supported local partners to develop their technical skills so they can run their own online cooking activities.
Edinburgh Community Food (ECF)’s cooking skills practitioners tried out, and continue to use a range of approaches and formats to teach online cooking – each adapted to the needs of the group. They use: Zoom to run interactive live cooking sessions with small groups; Facebook Live, where two practitioners run a live cooking demo with participants watching; and they run closed Facebook groups, which provide self-paced options for participants. They have also uploaded videos to their YouTube channel, but find the other options more useful for their approach.
The format
Are the cooking sessions self-paced, real time learning or something in-between? ECF and Greener Kirkcaldy have successfully used a range of these formats to engage with communities.
Reaching people, community engagement and attendance
Greener Kirkcaldy have found that delivering online activities has helped to keep them engaged with their local community.
Recipes and ingredients
Both ECF and Greener Kirkcaldy have tried different ways to make sure people have the ingredients they need for a cooking session. Both find that providing ingredients to the participant by either delivering these, or having these picked up ensures that people have everything they need.
Greener Kirkcaldy have used really simple recipes for their YouTube videos, this makes filming easier and videos shorter.
Safety, privacy and data challenges
Participants and practitioners taking part in online video calls from home are effectively letting others into their homes. Both ECF and Greener Kirkcaldy have developed policies around privacy. For example, ECF asks participants to stay in ‘public’ rooms, such as the kitchen or living room, during any type of online training. Children and young people under 18 years of age must be accompanied by a parent or carer to ensure safeguarding during online sessions.
Both ECF and Greener Kirkcaldy recruit course participants who may not have access to laptops/ tablets or need assistance to pay for extra data (live sessions use a lot of data). Both have used funding to assist people with accessing tablets or data.
Measuring impact – keeping in contact
YouTube and videos – developing your inner film director
Although some people are used to developing short videos, there’s more to consider when planning cooking videos. The benefits and challenges of making and showing YouTube videos include:
Benefits
Challenges
Greener Kirkcaldy have recently run a joint training session with partners who are planning to run their own cooking activities online. The training is focused on developing technical skills and tips around filming for YouTube. These have included:
Tips
Zoom
Zoom offers live video calls with online chat options. ECF has been using this format regularly for live face-to-face cooking sessions over the last year. These are led by one facilitator who uses a laptop camera to film from, and by moving the laptop around the kitchen as needed. ECF runs these sessions for up to two hours (with breaks with the cameras switched off).
Benefits
Challenges
Tips
Facebook Live
ECF uses Facebook Live to livestream a cooking demo. Participants watch the cooking demo and can interact with the session using Facebook chat. ECF runs this with two practitioners so that one person focuses on answering the chat while the other person does the cooking. Split screens showing both practitioners is also possible.
Benefits
Challenge
Closed Facebook groups
ECF uses closed Facebook groups for some groups, sometimes for a specific number of weeks or these can be ongoing. This involves uploading cooking demos and resources and encouraging participants to interact by uploading their own cooking images and comments.
Benefits
Challenges
Both ECF and Greener Kirkcaldy plan to continue online activities in future and will run these alongside face-to-face activities when this is possible. Greener Kirkcaldy is positive about how an online approach can reach a wider audience and ECF envisages a mixed model and making the most of what they have gained from running online activities.
The Third Sector Lab has a series of videos about running online community activities. These are available on the Third Sector Lab website. https://thirdsectorlab.co.uk/training/
SCVO has a range of ‘how to..’ guides, including on digital inclusion and shifting your service online. The guides are available on the SCVO website. https://scvo.scot/support/digital
Thanks to Greener Kirkcaldy and ECF for putting together their tips and ideas.
Our latest Covid-19 e-bulletin is now available, giving you information on how Community Food Initiatives are coping with the current lockdown and planning for recovery, including putting more activities online. Plus the latest webinars and reports. You can read the e-bulletin here.
In this blog post, our colleague Jacqui McDowell gives her views about the variety of community food provision models using surplus food:
Surplus food, emergency food aid and the pandemic
Putting to one side any debate and discussion on surplus food (such as definitions or sustainability), redirecting surplus food to emergency food aid has been an important part of the response to food insecurity during the pandemic. Surplus food has come from a range of sources such as pubs, restaurants, hotels and works canteens – many of which had to close during lockdowns, or via pre-existing established routes such as Fareshare or local relationships with producers and retailers. Alongside its “cash first approach” the Scottish Government also provided funding to support organisations to distribute and use surplus food in wider community based emergency food responses, such was the severity of need that many were experiencing.
These emergency responses show a repurposing of community facilities and spaces or volunteer mobilisations (sometimes referred to as food hubs) to carry out mass production of meals or repackaging of food parcels for delivery or pick up, using surplus, locally donated or purchased food. These emergency food hubs have often brought together different community partners, including many who are new to community food work but who are energetic, enthusiastic and concerned about their communities.
These new and emergent partnerships or collaborations have often provided vital help especially where they: substituted for, or expanded usual food bank operations; were offered as part of alternatives to school meal provision; or replaced hot meals no longer able to be provided by community cafes or community meal providers.
As we now move towards thinking about recovery and renewal there is likely to be a place for ongoing emergency food provision, whether through food banks or meal provision, though at present the size and scale of this is hard to predict. It may be useful to remind ourselves that the longer term aspiration of the Scottish Government (and many advocacy organisations) has been to promote “cash first” solutions and to reduce reliance on emergency food aid, and where emergency food aid is necessary, to ensure this is provided in dignified and sustainable ways. A useful illustration of this can be found in the Menu for Change work carried out by Oxfam, Child Poverty Action Group, Poverty Alliance and Nourish Scotland.
So, looking beyond meal and parcel distribution, where and how do we see the redistribution of surplus food fitting into our future community food provision?
Food hubs, food banks, social supermarkets, larders, community fridges and pantries…
Sitting in my spare room, with terms like pantries, social supermarkets and community meals, fridges or larders in my head, I can’t help wondering if hybrids have already emerged or that there is a spectrum or continuum of operational models. I also wonder how these will evolve as we move through recovery and renewal.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, perhaps, I need to be clear what I understand to be the main features of some of the different models around at the moment, before embarking on any musing about whether or not there may be hybrids emerging and why and to whom this may matter…..
Mentioned earlier, community meals were becoming more prevalent pre-pandemic as a way to support those who are vulnerable or at risk of food insecurity and use surplus food without stigma – as these can be open to all in the community. Often these are run by volunteers, perhaps with support from a local community organisation or access to a village hall or meeting space, where it is possible to access utilities at free or reduced cost. The choice of social meal option may be limited, however community members can contribute on a ‘pay as you feel’ basis or other in-kind support. There is often a strong social aspect to this model – promoting inclusion, intergenerational engagement and wellbeing.
Social supermarkets and food pantries have been around for a long time. The terms can be used interchangeably, although they use a range of operating structures. This can make things confusing as: the use of membership fees and access criteria may vary: some may offer fresh or ambient foods alongside personal hygiene products or everyday household items; items may be provided at discounted rates or members can select (or be provided with) items up to a certain value or quantity. Some also offer informal or more formal support, such as: individual personal development sessions, group cooking or budgeting sessions, training and skills development for employment or opportunities to volunteer with other local projects.
So for the purposes of simplicity I’m going to suggest distinctions between social supermarket and pantry models lie somewhere between those discussed in A. Paget’s Demos report and those expressed in this more recent academic paper by Saxena and Tornagh. That is – while both models may have fee paying memberships and use surplus food to reduce waste and protect the environment, there may be differences between the rights and responsibilities of members and operational practice. Here’s more detail about these:
A social supermarket may have a distinct membership who may purchase food items (i.e.: groceries rather than prepared food or hot meals) and often other shopping bag items at a reduced or subsidised rate. There is likely to be a more formal contract between the social supermarket and its members. Thus support or services may be provided, with a clear purpose to reduce and tackle the members’ food poverty as well as underlying issues. Therefore other facilities such as a café or training room may be available.
A food pantry will also have a distinct, perhaps more community of place based membership. It is more likely that only food items may be available, both fresh and ambient. Food may be supplied up to a prescribed financial value or quantity. The member may be able to choose what they buy, though this may be limited to ensure equity of choice between members. Any support offered may be more informal or peer to peer in nature, possibly around trying new items, recipes or cooking advice. Using surplus or donated food, a pantry is likely to have a more immediate focus on the relief of food insecurity than wider poverty issues.
Another model – Community fridges are more likely to be open for any member of the local community to use free of charge. The surplus food can come from a variety of sources, including individuals contributing items they have at home which would otherwise go to waste. Fresh and ambient food stuffs may be available, although the range of items may vary or be in small quantities. Volunteers or peers in the community may be present during opening hours, so any support may be much more socially focused, with perhaps, sharing knowledge of ingredients or tips on use. Those responsible for managing a community fridge are likely to emphasise their role in reducing food waste to address environmental concerns rather than to reduce food insecurity, as this recent research E. Brown explores.
A community larder is more likely to sit alongside or within other services or provision, such as residential accommodation. So rather than formal membership there may be a community of interest or common access to the service. The free food available is mainly ambient items such as pasta or tinned goods. Staff on-site may provide support to choose items to make a meal or provide advice on cooking.
The current landscape of this type of food provision is busy – there is an expanding network of fridges, pantries and social supermarkets. For example in Scotland we have seen the emergence of a Scottish Community Pantry Network while across the UK Hubbub have been providing support for the development of Community Fridges. The Community Shop – a food redistribution franchise, is opening more social supermarkets in England, including in Liverpool. In the last few years there has also been significant investment in a model of social supermarkets to address poverty in Northern Ireland.
So back to my lonely makeshift office musing. Does clarity of definition or model matter and to whom? Does it just depends on your perspective? For example, when considering the models an academic might focus on unpacking aspects of dignity such as choice, contribution or relationship, alongside operational aspects of setting, scale, resourcing, standardisation or diversity. Providers and activists may focus on the purpose (i.e. addressing poverty verses environmental challenges, or somewhere between), the quality or range of food produce, the involvement of community members or the holistic nature of support. The hungry person might just care about cost and accessibility.
And the commissioner or funder? Well they may look for an evidence base or seek recommendations from experts in the field. In which case how closely operational practice matches an evaluated or researched model may be something that interests them.
So when I ask does the name and label matter, I’m just wondering to what extent do differences between models of surplus food redistribution register and to whom? Does it matter if ‘Our Community Pantry’ operates more like ‘This Place’s’ social supermarket or that’ Everyone Here’s Village Pantry’ is really a larder?
How far do operational practices morph or evolve anyway, whether by accident or design? Who knows and who decides?
Note: This blog is focused on models which redistribute surplus food not community retail businesses, such as community owned and run shops or pubs, where food may be bought for sale at or around cost price or to serve meals. For more information on community shops and community pubs visit the Plunkett Foundation website.
Lyndsay Clark from the Feeding Fifers team tell us what they have learnt from putting cooking skills work online:
Feeding Fifers now has their very own Face Book page! The Facebook page went live on the 25th November 2020 and now has nearly 300 followers. It has been a steep learning curve for two of the Feeding Fifers team as up until the beginning of November they didn’t even have their own Facebook page! So they had to learn the ins and outs of Facebook, how do you post information, how do you upload pictures videos etc. Posting information initially was daunting for them but practice is making them more confident!
Once we had established our own page, key decisions had to be made, what was our aim, what we are trying to achieve, who should we target, how many posts should we do per week….
The benefit of having our own page makes it easier to post our own posts without relying on others, and we can react quickly to other social media posts.
Since we launched our own page we ran a series of recipes over the Christmas period, these recipes were based on original Cook Well Live Well recipes but were adapted for Facebook. At the start of the New Year we made Feeding Fifers Food Pledges – each of the Feeding Fifers has made a pledge to change something in their diets – eating more sustainable protein, drinking more (water obviously!), reducing food waste and cutting down on portions. Over the coming weeks we will post hints and tips on what we are doing and the hope is that our followers will make pledges of their own. We have discovered and use Canva to help us with the design of our posts.
Monitoring the posts provides interesting information; some posts are more successful in reaching people than others, one recipe posted just after Christmas reached nearly 4000 people whereas others are only reaching 70+ people. Ideally we would like to get comments: we do get some but we need to try and work out how to get more of these as this could give us key information that what we are posting is of use to groups, people and is of value.
Until life can get back to some form of normality, Feeding Fifers will continue its great work posting and sharing information across the Kingdom and beyond!
You can get in contact with Feeding Fifers on the Facebook page here.
The Screening and Immunisation Team in Public Health Scotland have provided an update about the process of getting the Covid-19 vaccine (8 February 2021):
‘We would like to update you about COVID-19 vaccination invitation process, so that you are well informed to support your community over the coming weeks and months. People are now being invited for their COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) priority list.
Who is invited?
NHS Scotland will follow the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advice and vaccinate those most at risk first, and those who work closest with them.
At present, NHS Health Boards are working towards inviting the following groups for vaccination:
The remaining JCVI groups will be called in due course and we will provide a further update around this.
From the 1 February, people aged 70 and over and the clinically extremely vulnerable – including over-16s on the shielding list – began receiving COVID-19 vaccines in a range of settings, including GP surgeries, community centres and mass vaccination centres (e.g. the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC), Aberdeen’s P&J LIVE at TECA and the Louisa Jordan in Glasgow). There are around 1100 vaccination sites now being used across Scotland.
How people are invited
There are different approaches in use – some people will be invited by phone and others by letter:
An SMS was sent out on the 4th of February to around 65,000 Clinically Extremely Vulnerable individuals (those shielding aged 16-65) from Scot.gov. It advised the group to contact the Covid-19 vaccination helpline (0800 030 8013) if they have been advised to shield and need transport support to attend their vaccination appointment. Helpline operators have been given details of each local authority transport arrangements and will transfer people to the National Assistance helpline who provide details of local transport e.g. local taxi.
Information about the COVID-19 vaccine
We are keen to ensure that everyone can access information about the COVID-19 vaccine, and would welcome your support with this. You may wish to signpost your community to NHS Inform COVID-19 vaccine website, to find details relevant to their NHS Health Board. This is also the place to go if individuals wish to rearrange an appointment or have lost their letter. People can also call the COVID-19 vaccination helpline on 0800 030 8013 (available 8am to 8pm, 7 days per week).
The invitation letter will include an information leaflet (in English language). If someone in your community requires the leaflet in another language or format, these are also available to download from the NHS inform COVID-19 vaccine website (17 community languages including British Sign Language, as well as Audio, Easy Read and Large Print formats. You can request hard copies of these leaflets from Public Health Scotland by emailing phs.covidpublications@phs.scot If you’d like to request hard copies of an alternative format or language, please email phs.otherformats@phs.scot
We are keen to ensure that all eligible groups can access the material provided and would welcome your support with this. We would appreciate if you could share this information with the groups that you work with via your appropriate channels. We will continue to provide updates over the coming months.’
If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch by emailing phs.screeningandimmunisation@phs.scot.
The Scottish Government has published a position statement in response to a joint letter to the UK from the UN Special Rapporteurs responsible for food and poverty. The statement outlines Scotland’s human rights approach to the challenges of food insecurity and poverty and outlines actions the Scottish Government has taken in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Food Insecurity and Poverty report is available on the Scottish Government website here.
VHS is carrying out important research across the third sector to help ensure that the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t widen the health inequalities gap by missing vulnerable groups. VHS are keen to ensure that the opportunity to get vaccinated is made as easy as possible for everyone in Scotland, including those who are furthest away from public services and who already face a wide range of inequalities. VHS will be feeding back the short survey results to the Public Health Scotland Evaluation of the Flu Vaccination COVID Vaccination (FVCV) programme and to the Scottish Government teams co-ordinating the COVID-19 Vaccination programme. If you are a third sector organisation working actively to support people’s health and wellbeing, you can help by completing the survey by Friday 19 February 2021
More information and the survey is available on the VHS website.
The survey closes on 19 Feb 2021
The Community and Third Sector Recovery Fund is continuing to provide grants, including to organisations providing support with food. For more information and to apply visit: https://scvo.scot/support/coronavirus/funding/scottish-government
The Social Renewal Advisory Board was set up by Scottish Ministers to make proposals to renew Scotland as we emerge from the pandemic. The Board spoke with people and communities across Scotland to shape its ‘Calls to Action’, which are based around three principles: Money and Work, People, Rights and Advancing Equality, and Communities and Collective Endeavour. Ensuring ‘everyone can access nutritious, culturally appropriate and affordable food’ is one of the 20 ‘calls to action’
https://www.gov.scot/publications/not-now-social-renewal-advisory-board-report-january-2021/
Our latest COVID-19 e-bulletin is now available, giving you information on how community food initiatives are coping with the current lock-down. News about CFIs, research, funding and guidance updates. You can access the e-bulletin here.
2020 has certainly been a challenging year for us all and community food initiatives have stepped up to respond to the needs of their communities. Over the last year we have shared learning from CFIs and many others. As we approach Christmas and the new year CFis continue to make plans to support local communities with food aid and to promote wellbeing over the holiday period.
These include CFINE in Aberdeen providing ideas on how its own supporters can help them to support those needing help over Christmas. The Scottish Pantry Network continues to promote newly opened pantries and its Facebook page includes Christmas themes. Greener Kirkcaldy, meanwhile has posted videos of what to do with your leftover sprouts and Feeding Fifers now have their own Facebook page where they are posting ideas and recipes, including ideas for Christmas and treats.
Funding to help people pay for food, heating, warm clothing and shelter during the winter is part of a new £100m support package from the Scottish Government.
The fund will help those on low incomes, children and people at risk of homelessness or social isolation cope with winter weather and the economic impact of coronavirus and Brexit. The Winter Plan for Social Protection will also address domestic abuse and digital exclusion.
Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership has made funding available to local organisations, to enable them to support people who may be isolated over the winter months. The fund is available to organisations currently supporting the residents of Glasgow City.
Priority will be given to organisations working with individuals most at risk of social isolation and loneliness as well as those most impacted by coronavirus.
Update 16 December 2020
This Fund has now reopened and will operate on a rolling basis until all the funds are allocated.
More information and details of how to apply on the Corra Foundation website.
This Fund will help grassroots organisations in Scotland to support vulnerable individuals, families and communities, including coping with the impact of coronavirus.
Grants of up to £10,000 are available to charities and voluntary organisations with an income of less than £250,000.
”Our funds will mainly continue to operate as before. But we have made some changes to help make sure our funds better support people and communities through COVID-19. These changes focus on broadening the type of work we can fund, but also mean funding is available for shorter periods and applications will be assessed quickly.’
The council has made funds available to support local community or resilience groups tackling food security in Aberdeenshire communities as a result of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Up to £2000 is available.
More information and details of how to apply on the Aberdeenshire Council website.
Last week SCDC, CDAS, SCDN and Public Health Scotland brought together more than 70 people to share key information from a range of guidance around community organisations assessing risk and re-opening without further transmission of the Covid-19 virus.
The event aimed to support those managing and delivering community learning and development support – and will also be of interest to community representatives making decisions about when and how to deliver their services.
This short survey aims to understand how community groups, third sector organisations and public bodies are delivering a co-ordinated response to the covid-19 pandemic.
SCDC is working with The Red Cross, Ready Scotland and other public sector resilience and third sector networks to understand and support co-ordinated approaches between public third and community sector organisations.
Your experience and views will help to further strengthen the working links between those delivering the ongoing Covid resilience effort – and be instrumental in understanding what has worked well and where to improve in the future.
Please take the time to complete this survey and share with colleagues.
Two new reports are now available to download from the Scottish Government website:
Coronavirus (Covid-19): supporting people at higher risk – qualitative research
Findings from interviews with representatives of 16 local authorities across Scotland, exploring how they have been supporting people at higher risk during Covid-19.
Coronavirus (Covid-19): supporting people at higher risk – survey of third sector organisations
This report examines findings from a survey of 530 third sector organisations in Scotland who supported people through the Covid-19 pandemic over March to August 2020.
A new briefing from the Independent Food Aid Network examines the learning from the use of food vouchers instead of or alongside food provision during lockdown. Its Cash First Project in Scotland involves co-developing practical tools and resources to improve access to cash-based options for those experiencing food insecurity, as well as working collaboratively with food aid providers.
Food bank managers who contributed to the briefing have found that offering shopping vouchers provides a more flexible and dignified way of supporting people.
The briefing can be found here.
The Scottish Government’s recently refreshed Ready Scotland website provides a range of information for anyone looking for support during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as advice on preparing for winter weather.
It also provides guidance for those who wish to help out those around them, whether on an individual basis or through volunteering with local community groups or charities.
Carnegie UK Trust has produced this new report, Pooling Together: How Community Hubs have responded to the COVID-19 Emergency, featuring case studies from hubs throughout the UK, available on the Carnegie website.
Sustain’s report, Community Food Retail and Food Poverty: examples of different models and guidelines for developing projects, looks at community food projects throughout the UK and how they adapted their model for Covid. Available to download from the Sustain website.
The University of Edinburgh’s analysis of the UK’s emergency food distribution scheme, Inside the Box, examines the government roll out of emergency food parcels, questioning the faults in the food system and raising questions about any future provision. The report can be downloaded from the University of Edinburgh website.
The Postcode Recovery Fund has been created to support charities to develop innovative solutions that address the many issues affecting people as society recovers from the effects of the pandemic.
Postcode Recovery Fund will offer a total award fund of £3,000,000 for charitable organisations to deliver projects within Great Britain in 2021-2023. Charities can apply for up to £1 million for a project that addresses a systemic societal issue related to the pandemic.
More information on eligibility and how to apply on the Postcode Dream Trust website.
Two new reports are now available that look at Covid-19 responses from the community food sector in Fife, looking back and moving forward.
Fife Food Champions are people who have been identified and supported by Fife Community Food Project and have demonstrated the ability and commitment to promote and deliver positive food messages to their local community. Their report, Going Forward after Covid-19, was produced from a virtual network meeting in August, which looked at the challenges behind and ahead of them.
Fife Food Champion Network report
Feeding Fifers was developed in April 2020 as a joint initiative between Fife Council, Fife Community Food Team and Fife Health and Social Care Partnership Food and Health Team to engage with communities across Fife throughout the covid-19 crisis. This report details how they aimed to bring people together through the sharing of healthy meal tips, meal ideas and recipes on social media.
Feeding Fifers social media engagement
In this bumper version of the #CommunityFoodNearMe social media posts that we have been sharing this week, we have a wee slideshow of colleague Jacqui’s visit to Gracemount Community Garden, where she took a few pictures and got chatting to the volunteers.
Two new reports from Public Health Scotland should be of interest to Scotland’s community food initiatives.
The COVID-19 Shielding Programme (Scotland) Impact and Experience Survey presents the findings of this online survey, which ran between 1 and 14 June 2020, was open to individuals who had received a letter from Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer advising them to follow shielding guidance. Individuals caring for someone else who had received a letter were also able to participate. The publication covers the following topics: shielding behaviour, negative impacts of shielding, shielding support and unmet needs.
Also recently published is Taking a human rights approach to recovery from Covid-19 a report that sets out how a human rights approach to planning the response to, recovery from and services for the COVID-19 pandemic might be done.
Both reports are available to download from the Public Health Scotland website.
A new charity fundraising hub has recently been launched. The hub includes easy-to-use tools and guidance, as well as checklists for grant applications. A series of webinars will also be streamed over the coming weeks.
The Community and Third Sector Recovery Programme is a £25m Scottish Government funded programme aiming to support charities, community groups, social enterprises and voluntary organisations that are supporting people and communities through the shift from lockdown to recovery.
The Programme has two strands: Adapt and Thrive, which offers tailored, specialist advice, as well as grants and loans; and the Community Recovery Fund. Both strands are open for applications on 21 September.
The University of Hereford has published research on ‘Scottish food practices’, exploring household practices and use of dietary information. The findings will help inform Food Standards Scotland develop dietary guidelines.
The research can be found on the University’s website.
Another recent publication from BMC Public Health is research on the lived experience of long-term health condition management amongst those who are food insecure. It finds four key themes emerging: the trade-offs and compromises people make in food practices; how illness experiences and food relate to physical and mental health; the invisibility of peoples poverty in health care contexts and people’s perceptions and expectations of the health care system.
The publication can be found on the BMC Public Health website.
Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s IHub has published a report on its learning about health and social care response to Covid-19. One of the key messages is about the important role of communities and the need to not only engage with them, but also invest in them. There are a number of case studies from across Scotland, many involving activities to address issues of food access and food insecurity.
The report can be found on the IHub site.
A new briefing by Food Active and the Children’s Food Campaign, Covid-19 and Children’s Food: Parents’ Priorities for Building Back Better, shares experiences of parents across the UK of how life under Covid-19 lockdown has affected their children’s food intake and preferences.
During the height of restrictions and now as we live with ongoing risk of Covid-19, the places we can walk or cycle to have become more important to us. Community support around food played, and will continue to play, a vital role. So whether an initiative continued to do what they normally do, changed and adapted things, or are just re-starting back up, we wanted to do something quick and easy to recognise and celebrate what we have access to locally.
#CommunityFoodNearMe is a social media campaign to recognise our local community food activity. Walk or cycle to one of your local initiatives, take a photo, then post it on twitter or facebook, using the hashtag #CommunityFoodNearMe. Also tag us and the organisation if they are on social media.
To start us off, team members will be sharing tweets about community food activity near them. Watch out for posts on organisations from Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Forth Valley. We hope that you can join us and celebrate community food activity across the country (and beyond).
https://twitter.com/P_H_S_CFHS
https://www.facebook.com/likeCFHS
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has published a short series of reports from its Covid-19 consumer research. The reports include people’s lived experiences of food insecurity, and how Covid-19 changed people’s shopping, cooking and eating habits.
You can read these reports on the FSA website.
The University of Sheffield, King’s College London, Sustain and Churches Action on Poverty are leading a study on food vulnerability during Covid-19. Their first report has been published.
You can read the report on the University of Sheffield’s website.
The Faculty of Public Health (FPH) has produced a position statement on Covid-19 and food. The statement recommends addressing the challenges around health inequalities and food systems and ensuring the nutritional quality of food aid during a crisis.
Many Community Food Initiatives work closely with local NHS dietitians or nutritionists. The Scottish Public Health Nutrition Group (SPHNG) brings these NHS public health nutrition representatives together and has produced a short snapshot of how they worked with communities during the lock-down and how they put their own activities (such as community cooking) online. The snapshot also considers the challenges ahead.
The snapshot of how NHS teams have supported community food work is available here:
How NHS teams have supported community food work during the pandemic.docx
The SPHNG snapshot complements our own ‘Snapshot of Covid-19, food insecurity and community food initiatives: What happened and what can we learn?’ which was published on this website in July 2020. The CFHS snapshot is available here:
CFHS-A-snapshot-of-Covid-19-food-insecurity-and-community-food-initiatives
10 am 3rd September
10 am 17th September
10 am 1st October
GCPH and Public Health Scotland, as part of the ScotPHO collaboration, are hosting three separate, but linked, online webinars, which focus on the impact of, the context to, and the emergence from, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Each free webinar will last an hour, with two 20-minute presentations, and 15 minutes of questions and discussion.
For more information and registration, visit the ScotPHO website.
This new project, a partnership between NLGN, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Carnegie UK Trust, and Power to Change, aims to capture and share the good practices that have emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, and find ways to embed and build on them.
If you work for a local authority, public service, community group or simply have a story to share, they would be interested to hear from you.
If you would like to contribute your experiences to this research, contact Simon Kaye, skaye@nlgn.org.uk.
You can find out more and read his blog on the NGLN website.
This fund from Foundation Scotland is now open for its second phase of funding, focussing on Recovery. Grants from £1000 to £5000 are available for charities and constituted community groups that have been impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic.
More information and details of how to apply on the Foundation Scotland website.
Our colleagues at CHEX have produced a new briefing on how we can use the community-led response to Covid-19 to help build back better in Scotland. CHEX, part of SCDC, highlights how the reaction to coronavirus has shown what is possible in terms of radically shifting our emphasis towards the things that really matter.
You can read the briefing on the CHEX website.
About the snapshot
In March 2020, the community and voluntary, private and public sectors responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lock-down. Community food initiatives either closed because of lock-down restrictions and others rapidly changed their services to meet a rise in the need for food delivery or food aid services.
This snapshot attempts to summarise what happened, and focuses particularly on the responses of community food initiatives and others that may influence their work. We also try to look forward – and consider how what we have learnt could be useful in the future.
This snapshot was put together from around 650 pieces of information from a range of sources – mainly social media and website posts, but also from speaking with people, from newsletters, emails and unpublished papers.
Thank you to all the groups and agencies that have shared information, achievements, aspirations and frustrations, directly and indirectly, formally and informally.
You can read the snapshot here
Here is the supplementary evidence snapshot
This webinar organised by Obesity Action Scotland and Public Health Scotland explored how advocates, strategists, and practitioners might yet place communities at the heart of the decisions that determine their diet and healthy weight. It featured Corinna Hakes, Kelly McBride, Kevin Ditcham and Lesley Forsyth, and explored three recent case studies to find lessons that will help us in our new COVID-19 shaped context.
The Poverty and Inequality Commission has now published this report of the results of its recent survey of community organisations providing emergency food across Scotland .
UPDATE 4 June 2020
The Scottish Government website includes a COVID-19 section with guidance on support, information, food and other essentials for individuals, as well as a wide range of sectors.
This week, the Scottish Government launched a National Assistance Helpline for people who are over 70 or receive the flu vaccine for medical reasons, do not have any access to the internet, and do not have anyone to help get essential supplies like food or medicine. You can pass this number on to someone you are supporting, or call on their behalf. More information is available from Ready Scotland
Guidance for callers – shielding and older people
If you are community organisation that has been contacted by someone who has received a letter about the SMS shielding service and is asking for your help to access this or understand this, the Scottish Government has provided guidance for you:
Shielding is for a specific group of around 120,000 people in Scotland, including children, who are at very high risk of severe illness from coronavirus (COVID-19). To help someone who’s shielding, it’s important that anyone else in the person’s household, their family and friends also understand and follow NHS shielding guidance. The latest on advice on who should be shielding and what support they can get can be found on NHS Inform.
The Scottish Government is also helping to support people who are in the specific shielding group by sending updates and help direct to their mobile phone, in particular to offer a weekly delivery of food, household items and delivery of prescription medications. This is called the SMS Shielding Service. A letter has been sent out to ask people who are shielding to register for the SMS Shielding Service.
People who are shielding and cannot access the SMS Shielding Service can still access support through their local council’s shielding support line.
Some people who receive a letter about the SMS Shielding Service may need more help to understand the content of the letter and what they need to do next. These people may:
When on a call with someone, you should check that the person has received a letter from the Chief Medical Officer and ask whether the person has been able to sign up to the SMS Shielding Service. If they have not been able to register themselves using the SMS system, then please ask the person to either:
[1] You can find further guidance about use and sharing of data during COVID-19 at: www.informationgovernance.scot.nhs.uk
Food Power and Sustainable Food Places (SFP) are jointly hosting weekly online forums for food alliance coordinators to connect and share with each other, hear national updates on food-related issues, and feedback their experiences to national network coordinators and campaigners. They run every Wednesday from 10:00 – 11:30am.
More information and details of how to register on the Sustain website.
Independent Age is offering funding for small organisations across the UK working with older people hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Four rounds of funding of £500,000 will be made available; the first of these will be open for applications until 4 June. Organisations can apply to receive up to £150,000 each.
More information on eligibility and details of how to apply on the Independent Age website.
UPDATE: 12 May 2020
Next round of funding from the Wellbeing Fund is now open to applications until 12 noon on 22 May 2020.
UPDATE: 17 April 2020: Wellbeing Fund
Community organisations looking for funding to support their food activities at this time should register an expression of interest to the Wellbeing Fund now. The first round will close at midnight on Sunday 19th April. It only takes 2 minutes to register, so you are urged to do this as soon as possible: https://scvo.scot/support/coronavirus/funding/scottish-government/wellbeing-fund
It is anticipated that the Wellbeing Fund will support a wide range of activities that protect and promote the wellbeing of individuals and communities across Scotland. Likely projects could include the purchase and delivery of food, activities to support people’s mental health and wellbeing, co-ordination of local activity and staff and volunteer expenses. These examples are not intended to be prescriptive of the type of support your organisation is looking for funding to deliver. For more information on this and other funding streams available please visit the SCVO page: https://scvo.org/support/coronavirus/funding/scottish-government/
UPDATE: the Scottish Government has provided further information about its Food Fund:
On 18 March, the Scottish Government announced an investment of £350 million to support local communities and households in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Information about the Third Sector Resilience Fund is available on the SCVO website
Our latest COVID-19 e-bulletin is now available, giving you information on how community food initiatives are coping in lock-down, news about research and advocacy and any challenges and concerns, as well as funding updates. You can access the e-bulletin here.
Our colleagues at GCVS have produced a very useful special bulletin, focussed on funding available to charities and community organisations developing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. GCVS also run regular funding surgeries, with a funding expert and plan to continue to offer these virtually. You can access the bulletin here.
Nourish have updated their dignity in practice principles as well as produced a blog on the right to food
Today the Food Foundation and Dr Rachel Loopstra discussed the latest results of our YouGov survey on food insecurity research during the Covid-19 crisis.
The recording of the webinar can be found HERE and the slide deck HERE. Also, Dr Rachel Loopstra from King’s College London has done an in-depth analysis of the figures in this preliminary report.
The Food Foundation will be hosting more webinars in the upcoming weeks, so please do keep an eye out for them by following them on Twitter and email office@foodfoundation.org to join the mailing list.
A committee at Westminster is looking for evidence on covid and the food supply. Further details on their website.
Scotland’s Poverty and Inequalities Commission has published a paper on the covid-19 crisis and the impact on food security which is available on the web.
The Scottish Government Food Insecurity Team have provided guidance for community food initiatives (CFIs), which covers information on: How CFIs can help: the Scottish Welfare Fund and use of vouchers; staff, volunteer and service user safety; food supply; maintaining dignity whilst providing food aid; food safety; and details about how to contact this Scottish Government Team.
See other posts for information about where to get the latest COVID-19 health advice and information about COVID-19 funding.
How Community Food Initiatives can help
The Scottish Government Food Insecurity Team recognise that community food groups and other organisations providing food are a vital service at this time and, as per the latest UK Government guidance, are not being asked to close.
They recognise that some CFIs may choose to close due to capacity or safety concerns. For those which continue to operate, the most up to date public health advice should be followed from www.nhsinform.scot/coronavirus
As far as possible we all want to ensure that:
Staff, volunteer and service user safety
Staff and volunteers should work from home where possible however we recognise that those delivering frontline services cannot follow this advice. To lower the risk of transmission and protect us all, social distancing advice should be followed at all times. This includes when working from premises:
When delivering food orders to people at home, the advice is to leave the shopping on the door step.
If this is not possible, then try to minimise the contact required to get the food into the home. For example, ask the recipient to stay in another room whilst the food is put away in the kitchen and remind everyone to regularly wash their hands.
Food supply
There is no overall shortage of food in Scotland – retailers have good food stocks and are working hard to replenish stock quickly.
Some stores are offering early slots for older people to do their shopping, and are putting in place support to ensure community food organisations are still able to access supplies. Contact your local retailers to find out which stores have adopted this policy and share this information with your community.
Local authorities and Local Resilience Partnerships should be working closely with retailers and suppliers, as well as FareShare, to support community food providers, food banks and others, to ensure consistent supply of food for those supporting at-risk groups. As with No Deal Brexit mitigation work, community food organisations will be able to access FareShare food without needing to pay membership fees.
Maintaining dignity and social but not physical contact
While this an emergency situation, it will be important to uphold high standards of care, ensuring as far as possible that decisions taken in the coming weeks promote everyone’s dignity and choice. Community food organisations are often vital sources of social contact. To support people’s mental wellbeing you might want to consider virtual befriending options, for example, telephone or video calling in place of in-person gathering. Befriending Networks have published guidance
Nourish Scotland and the Dignity Peer Network have produced advice on how to maintain dignity in community food provision at this time.
Food safety
There is no evidence that food is a source of coronavirus or that it can be transmitted through the consumption of food. Based on what we know about similar viruses, the virus would be inactivated through thorough cooking and the disinfection of food preparation surfaces using appropriate methods.
Therefore, it is important to follow good hygiene practice at all times when handling food, taking the following precautions to prevent the spread of infection:
Further information and guidance is available from Food Standards Scotland.
Key Scottish Government contact
If you have any queries on the above please email SocialJusticeMailbox@gov.scot and someone will respond as soon as possible.
UPDATE: 17 April 2020.
The Food Standards Agency recently produced guidance for Covid-19 guidance for food businesses and their employees.
The UK government has also provided comprehensive advice for food businesses.
NHS Forth Valley have produced a useful video on providing shopping to people in your community safely.
For the most up to date health advice please visit NHS Inform.
A message from the Nourish team:-
The outbreak of coronavirus is having a major impact on different parts of the food system. We want to understand the effect this disruption is having on those within our network in order to inform how we can best support each other in the next stages.
Please help us by completing this survey. We will be in touch with a follow-up as soon as we can.
This survey is now closed
Please follow the link to our newest e-bulletin here.
Coronavirus guidance
If you are concerned over how you or your food initiative should respond to coronavirus then the best source of information for the public is NHS Inform, with Health Protection Scotland providing the latest advice for professional staff. Information should also be sought from local official sources.
Many of you will be trusted sources of information yourselves for many vulnerable groups and it is important you keep as up to date as possible with the latest official advice.
Food safety
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has confirmed that there is currently no evidence that food is a likely source, or route of transmission, of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). It says that previous outbreaks of similar viruses showed that transmission through food consumption did not occur.
Nonetheless, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued precautionary recommendations for food safety, including advice on following good hygiene practices during food handling and preparation.
…
This is a rapidly changing situation so please keep up to date with the official sources of information and advice on a regular basis.
Please see the publications library for the March edition of Fare Choice.
To get involved or find out more information please visit the Fairtrade Foundation website.
Please follow the link to our newest e-bulletin here.
Please can you take 5 minutes of your time and complete our recent survey on communications and social media. It is simple to follow and will help inform our future work by measuring impact and effectiveness.
Access the survey here
Closing date Friday 13 March 2020. Many thanks.
In partnership with Children in Scotland and Dundee Bairns, the Food Foundation are holding an international conference on child food insecurity in Dundee on the 28th-29th April 2020. The event will include all their young food ambassadors and Dame Emma Thompson.
Register interest via: events@childreninscotland.org.uk
To find out more please visit the Food Foundation’s website and follow them on Twitter @CFFInquiry
I was recently lucky enough to attend and present the results of our realist evaluation of cooking skills courses at a conference in Lisbon. This was the 3rd COOK and Health international conference and was attended by around 60 researchers, all of whom, like me, were enthusiastic about cooking skills. So what did we have to talk about?
More home cooking may help improve our diet…
The conference kicked off with a research presentation from Susanne Mills. Susanne and her colleagues looked at a UK study of over 11 thousand adults and found that eating home cooked meals more often was associated with a better diet, particularly an increased intake of fruit and vegetables (compared to eating out or using ready meals). It was also associated with being a healthier weight and having lower body fat. The best results were where people reported they ate home cooked food as their main meal more than five times a week, but eating home-cook meals more than three times a weeks was also beneficial.
What inspires or enables people to cook?
Trying to understand the sociological and psychological processes that support or inspire people to cook more homemade meals can be tricky to understand and measure. Our own realist evaluation used a behaviour change framework to understand and map how people reacted to cooking courses and the context of their own lives. These reactions turned out to be important: getting a wider range of these (positive) reactions from people was associated with a better diet and increased cooking skills.
Two of the reactions that were part of the framework we used were self-efficacy (i.e.: the confidence and ability to do a task) and (positive) attitude. Both of these reactions or processes were commonly discussed throughout the conference, even when the researchers used different theoretical frameworks to ours.
Another framework or tool to measure these reactions or processes was presented by Julia Wolfson. Julie and colleagues used the term ‘Food Agency’ to cover three processes that work together to either support or prevent people from cooking good food. These were: Food Self-efficacy, Food Attitude and Structure (i.e.: the context of people’s lives which can prevent or promote home cooking). Julia’s research measured Food Agency in a selection of adults from the USA and not surprisingly found that people with a higher Food Agency score were more likely to prepare home cooked meals more often. A higher Food Agency score seemed to increase with people’s age and either a very low or a very high income seemed to be associated with a lower Food Agency score. (Although the researchers acknowledged they did not have information from a wide enough range of people across income groups to make firm conclusions about the effect of income). So how can the idea of Food Agency be used to support better cooking courses? Julia and her colleagues have produced an academic poster that lists the skills and approaches they have used to try to support the development of Food Agency.
Lynn Fredericks, who runs Family Cook Productions – a social enterprise in New York– spoke about how she developed a theoretical framework on ‘experiential drivers’ to better plan and evaluate cooking courses that will inspire people to carry out more home cooking. These drivers included: ensuring that people feel their cooking is successful; developing their palates; encouraging peer support as well as more practical activities such as building and reinforcing skills. A You tube video summarises these drivers and is based on cooking courses for young people.
Recurring issues
Time…
An ongoing theme throughout the conference was the acknowledgement that ‘cooking’ (and all the ‘invisible’ labour associated with cooking – deciding what to cook, planning, shopping, cooking, clearing up etc.) is a complex activity which many struggle to find time for. Amy Trubek and other researchers recognised that a lack of time can be too much for some people and simply saying there are plenty of ‘quick and easy meals’ that people could find time to do if they simply planned better is not always helpful.
Guilt…
And the first day of the conference finished off with a presentation from Sarah Bowen, who has written a book called ‘Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It’. The book examines Americans’ association with food and messages from celebrity chefs and others telling us we have no excuses for not feeding ourselves and our families’ proper food. She suggests people should not feel guilty about finding compromising solutions such as using ready prepared ingredients or buying ‘meal kits’ to save time.
Food security…
Sarah Bowen and many others also acknowledged that more home cooking, or developing cooking skills is just one small component for eating well, particularly for people who may be food insecure. As well as more or better paid employment and more structural solutions, food related initiatives suggested included community meals and providing affordable meal kits.
Take home messages on community cooking courses
“Community anchor” has become a bit of a cool term, to describe the stature and relevance of organisations within a community to funders and policy makers. Alongside “anchor organisation” and “anchor institution” (see box insert) this jargon is doing the rounds, and though the language is not new[1], I wonder if we all mean the same thing or share similar expectations about the roles and responsibilities associated with the terms… well that’s what I’m going to explore.
As well as the large heavy object that keeps a ship from drifting away, “anchor” also refers to someone who provides strength or support. Thus a “community anchor” could be an organisation that supports others or acts as a stabilising force – OK so that would mean every community based organisation supporting others is an anchor….Is that all there is to it? Well possibly not ….
In academic discourse[2] those who own or manage community assets, such as Development Trusts or Housing Associations, are often cited as “community anchors”. The literature also explores the ways in which they are rooted or embedded in their communities and support or improve the resilience and wellbeing of their community. Digging into what this really means, or looks like in practice, suggests that a “community anchor” would exhibit the following characteristics:
So what? Many community food initiatives, whether they own or manage community assets, will be able to demonstrate they match into one or more of the characteristics above, and call themselves a “community anchor”.
My question in seeing this language used more freely, (or perhaps better expressed as hesitation,) is could this create difficulties, misperceptions or unrealistic expectations further down the line?
An “Anchor organisation/institution” is normally Council, NHS or University, where the expectation[1] is that as employers, procurers and asset owners they can lever substantial social, economic and environmental benefits for the community around them. For example:
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[1] https://scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/about/anchor-orgs/ https://www.schw.co.uk/Community-Anchors-Nov151.pdf
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1018.3954&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://pureapps2.hw.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/14734940/cwilliams.PDF
[3] https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/building-healthier-communities-role-of-nhs-as-anchor-institution
This event, held at Edinburgh Training Centre on 25 November 2019, was organised jointly with the Scottish Government, who gave an update on the data currently collected by the Scottish Health Survey and the move to questions within the UK-wide Family Resources Survey. A Menu for Change were also involved in organising the event and shared results from the research component of their three-year project. Central and West Integration Network shared the lessons from their experience of undertaking community-led research.
The presentations from the event are now available below:
Dr Rachel Loopstra
Scottish Government
Central and West Integration Network
A report on the day’s activities and findings will follow.
Community Food and Health Scotland’s 2019 Annual Networking Conference – Priceless – was an informative event, which stimulated many interesting discussions and was an excellent networking opportunity.
Our keynote speaker’s Wendy Wills Presentation at Priceless Conference has been uploaded. Please follow this link to read the Conference summary report. In addition, an evaluation survey summary report, can be found here:- CFHS event survey summary March 2020.
In the afternoon all conference delegates took part in a participative session “Have your say”. The purpose of this session was to let delegates hear about what was discussed at a Community Food Summit earlier in the autumn and feed in their views. The Summit was convened in response to the proposal in the Scottish Government’s Diet and Healthy Weight Delivery Plan, to explore how we can best enhance local community-led initiatives to make healthy, affordable food more accessible. This 2-page summit report provides a summary of what was discussed by the 60 individuals who attended the Summit from across the community food sector.
Issue 80 of our newsletter, Fare Choice, is now available to download from the publications library.
“…. And it was the first time he’d ever seen the sea…”
This is what I remember from the University’s evaluation of holiday clubs I once ran. I’ve long forgotten the academic’s impressive statistics – her pages of scientific proof of the equitable benefits of those holiday clubs – it is just this anecdote that endures. And it is my imagination of the child’s face when he first saw the shoreline that helps me explain why in London – as well as in my new home of Scotland – professionals, volunteers and carers are so keen to help these clubs.
However, as vital as enthusiasm and goodwill are, these traits will only get us so far. Me? I’d change loads of what I did. And, as I find out more about what others do in the planning of their holiday programmes, I learn that my missteps are common missteps. That doesn’t seem right. After all, lessons are to be shared. This blog outlines my thoughts on how community and public assets can be best harnessed in the running of holiday clubs. These reflections on my past experience have been triggered by meetings with many of Scotland’s community food initiatives and Scotland’s launch of the Children’s Future Food Enquiry in May 2019.
Three things I learnt in England:
1. Holiday programmes should use the ‘whole system’
Who better to provide safe and edifying care than the people who have established relationships within a community: youth workers, teachers, sports coaches, cooking teachers, lifeguards or librarians? Who better to promote holiday clubs than a child’s own school, or their family’s GP, social prescriber, housing association, social workers, community policing team, advocate, case worker, welfare advisor or food bank? Who can provide the affordable and attractive venues better than the local school, youth club, community centre, library, leisure centre, park, community café, or anchor organisation? Where else to turn for healthy food than a local caterer, food cooperative, school kitchen, community cafe, community-minded businesses or – indeed – the children’s own cheffing talents?
With all these possible local assets, it’s obvious why a single person, team, or organisation shouldn’t run a holiday programme all by themselves. If a holiday programme is really going to improve a child’s health, their ability to learn, or their lifetime aspirations, many more people are needed in the planning process. Thankfully, the great thing about a holiday programme is that the people desirable for the planning are, almost without exception, keen to be in the planning room. After all, are many of us so fortunate to regularly work on such immediately rewarding projects?
2.‘Whole system’ holiday programmes need formal partnerships
So, let’s assume most of the people listed above are willing to help out. Now what? By their very nature, the diverse collaborations best able to devise holiday programmes share no formal authority. And yet, at some point, for them to run successfully, someone needs to make decisions. In my first year running these clubs, as the person trusted with the programme’s budget, I thought I could play this role. I was wrong. Charm, hard work and good luck just about helped us to scrape through. Nevertheless, by the second year, I had learnt valuable lessons in collaborative governance and we put in place a formal planning partnership underpinned by transparent agreements.
My choices as to how to spend scarce funding that year necessarily denied many would-be collaborators their role in the holiday programme. I believe my decisions that first year offered our area’s children the best quality, safest, most reliable, scalable, accessible, healthy and affordable activities. But that’s almost beside the point. What should have been paramount for sustainability is that the community and my collaborators had faith in the decision making process. When working within the whole system, this faith is difficult for one self-appointed lead institution to achieve – let alone one individual. It wasn’t hard for any dejected would-be collaborators to perceive a conflict of interest. And in many ways, they were right. After all, as much as I tried to avoid these, to what extent did trivialities including professional congeniality, budget shortfalls and ease of procurement subtly influence my decisions?
By the second year, we’d set up our areas . This new coalition provided our area’s holiday programme the best governance mechanism available. By running planning decisions through the partnership we achieved a high degree of legitimacy within the community. After all, the Partnership had established a robustness through its broad membership, its elected chair person, its independent coordinator, its co-produced strategy and its multi-sector steering group.
3. Partnerships need minimum standards
Simply put – because there will always be someone who frivolously suggests that they be funded to give away (redistributed) food at their annual festival – the planners of a holiday programme need to consider exactly what they’re trying to achieve. In our area, it wasn’t felt useful, or dignified, to provide semi-stale buns to the frequenters of one-off events. We had bolder ambitions for our holiday clubs. We wanted to both reduce inequalities in children’s education and health. As a result, our holiday programme needed to be made up of free, fun, inclusive, edifying and catered activities.
Therefore, we put out a funding call to all appropriate collaborators indicating our intention to fund a fixed number of clubs by any number of providers so long as they provided at least three hours of safe, fun, edifying and catered activity per day, for at least four days per week during the school holidays. We ran a competition adjudicated by our Partnership’s Board and honoured by one of our Member’s grant giving capabilities. Our Food Partnership favoured the best value applications. However, we made explicit provisions to accept more costly proposals providing they could be shown to build productive relationships between organisations, develop new skills within communities or appeal to groups of children not yet catered for by the overall programme. The quality of bids we received was unprecedented. For example, some of the collaborative arrangements proposed between leisure centres and coops, third sector and libraries surpassed our imagination.
I have listed the three ways my approach to planning holiday clubs improved over the two years I helped run them. For me, collaborative, rule-based partnerships will become a key feature of best holiday programmes. However, these three measures are not a recipe for success. I was far from cracking this. Indeed, my final year running these collaborations had its own problems. The biggest of which, in my opinion, was the fact that decisions as to what would benefit children the most were still being made exclusively by rooms of (mostly white collared) adults.
Something to learn in Scotland:
1. Participatory Budgeting
Despite of all the efforts we’d made to democratise the planning of holiday programmes, no matter how detailed our bureaucracy, we did not save ourselves from perversity of deciding whether children from low income families would prefer a week’s music production course or a theatre workshop; whether they’d prefer 10 free spaces on an outdoor pursuits retreat, versus 120 free spaces on a lunch club within their school buildings. As I’ve been getting to know the community planning infrastructure in Scotland, I have started to wonder whether participatory budgeting may help solve this issue and thereby add a valuable dimension to the planning of holiday programmes.
It seems intuitive to me that the best way to plan a summer programme would be with the children and families that the professionals are most keen to see attend. Giving them a chance to decide how funds are spent could be game changing. I have yet to hear of a Council that’s included its holiday provision in its participatory budgeting. And yet, I hope we learn from the first that does.
In conclusion, tax funded, catered holiday clubs – free at the point of use – are needed across Scotland to prevent the school holidays being a source of childhood inequality. With practice, we’ll get the best from these clubs. Nevertheless, for the time being, there remains unanswered questions about the best ways to run them. I hope that my first-hand experience, limited though it is, provokes your thoughts. Get in touch if you know better. If there’s interest, I’d like to help the proper experts create a more systematic account of how (and who) should organise and run these clubs.
With thanks to those in North Lanarkshire and Edinburgh who helped me understand how their areas have been running holiday clubs in recent years.
francis.eatwell-roberts@nhs.net
It has been decided not to run our development fund in 2019.
Our thanks go to all those community initiatives who have achieved so much with so little over the years. We intend exploring the impact and influence these small amounts of funding have had and will no doubt be in touch with a number of past recipients
Central and West Integration Network were supported by CFHS/NHS Health Scotland last year to lead a community-led research project.
The research explored the experiences of ethnic minority communities around food security, diet and obesity. Specifically, the aim was to learn more about:
The research was carried out by 12 community research volunteers. The findings included information from 56 people from BME communities, including a third who were refugees or asylum seekers. The researchers found that although there were some cultural influences on diet or views of obesity, most people were well aware of the association between diet, physical activity and weight and obesity related health issues. Similarly to a previous research project by CWIN, affordability was one of the main barriers to healthy eating (and taking up physical activities). See the final report (12 pages) and short summary below for more details.
This Community Food and Health (Scotland) workshop will be held on Thursday 9 May. 1.30pm – 4pm (lunch 12.30) Stirling
- Come and hear from three organisations who train people to run community cooking skills courses, on how they have cascaded learning from a CFHS realist evaluation of community cooking skills courses.
- Share and learn from others who train people to run cooking skills courses
- Discuss how community courses can be more meaningful for people attending them
You are welcome to attend this workshop if you:
- already run cooking skills train the trainers courses (such as the REHIS ‘How to run a cooking group’ or your own course/mentoring activities)
- are planning to run cooking skills train the trainers courses
- manage, fund, or commission community cooking skills courses.
If you would like to attend, please email kim.newstead@nhs.net by Friday 3rd May. We will prioritise attendance from those we say we welcome. So please let us know why you would like to attend. Thanks.
Please note: this meeting is being held after the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland (REHIS) Food and Health Presenters update seminar. Please visit the REHIS website if you would like to attend their event.
Background on why we are running this workshop
- CFHS completed a realist evaluation of community cooking skills courses in 2018. Rather than simply finding out if cooking courses ‘work’ the realist evaluation aimed to find out ‘what works, for whom, why and in what context’. Eight organisations were involved in the evaluation and a final report is available here.
- Three of the organisations then went on to incorporate learning from the realist evaluation within their own train the trainers’ courses.
- The three organisations were Fife Health and Social Care Partnership (Lyndsay Clark), NHS Grampian (Fiona Matthew) and NHS Forth Valley (Rhonda Archibald)
The Citizens Advice Scotland’s Food on the Table report is based on its survey completed by 2,651 people in Scotland, through an online survey and through local Citizens Advice Bureaux campaign activity across the country. The aim was to better understand the day-to-day realities that people face when accessing, affording and choosing food for themselves and their families.
Key findings:
The survey findings demonstrate the broad spectrum of issues people are having with accessing and affording food. People who are worrying about their food bill completed the survey through to people who are consistently making sacrifices about the quality and quantity of the food they eat. Crucially, the findings show that working people are also routinely struggling to afford food and are cutting down meal sizes or skipping meals because they simply do not have the money they need to buy food.
You can find out more about the survey and download the report from the CAS website:
Thanks to all who attended our annual networking event, Hear Say, on 24 October 2018, making it such a great day.
Community activists, local practitioners, planners, policy makers and academics from across the country and sectors and disciplines came together in Dunfermline to hear a range of speakers, take part in table and workshop discussions and visit a busy marketplace.
Entitled Hear Say, the idea was that those who came together had a lot to say as well as hear and the theme for the day was building on learning.
A brief write up from the day is now available at the link below.
www.communityfoodandhealth.org.uk/Annual-conference-2018-notes.docx
NHS Health Scotland has just published its latest health inequalities briefing on food poverty, complementing the pages on the same subject that are available on its website www.healthscotland.scot
The Improving Health Commission wants to hear from you as it considers the health improvement aspects of the reform of public health in Scotland. You have until 23rd November to take part in their survey available on the Public Health Reform website.
The Scottish Food Coalition are looking for people who would like to become Good Food Nation Ambassadors for the expected Good Food Nation consultation. Information on training and how to apply is available on the Scottish Food Coalition website.
The latest seminar on measuring food insecurity, co-organised with A Menu for Change, took place in Glasgow at the beginning of October.
National and international presentations, including a look at the first data from the new food insecurity questions in the Scottish Health Survey, an update on A Menu for Change and a fascinating insight from Canada, are all available below as well as a report on the day.
Why measure food insecurity? Valerie Tarasuk, University of Toronto
Food insecurity in Scotland: insights from the Scottish Health Survey – Dr Catriona Rooke, Scottish Government
Using research for policy and practice change – Mary Anne Macleod, A Menu for Change
Understanding food insecurity in Scotland – seminar report
A new briefing on the role of social enterprises in tackling mental health and wellbeing is downloadable from the Senscot website.
NHS Health Scotland have published a report comparing the impact of income-based policies on health and health inequalities for the Scottish population. This can be downloaded from the Health Scotland website.
Glasgow City Council is aware increasing numbers of people in Glasgow are experiencing difficulties – physically and economically – accessing sufficient, safe and nutritious food. It is currently conducting an inquiry to seek evidence and views on this important subject.
It also knows that a wide range of organisations and charities are responding to those experiencing acute food insecurity – including an established community food sector.
The council wishes to work with these partners and organisations across Glasgow to ensure the city is operating these responses and services as effectively as possible and wishes to seek views on:
More information about the inquiry is here
If you take part in, volunteer or work in local food projects in the Canal Ward (community meals, growing,cooking, emergency food provision.) Good Food For All will ensure you hear what’s happening in other areas, get a chance to talk about what’s happening locally and help plan for change. The event is being run by Thriving Places, Propagate and partners and is on 24th October
The event includes speakers from Menu for Change Project (Oxfam, Nourish, the Poverty Alliance, Child Poverty Action Group), Moogety Grub Hub, the Food Bank Support Project and the NW CAB Community Food Development Project
Click here for booking details
Citizens Advice Bureaux across Scotland recently launched the Food on the Table campaign which aims to give the Scottish public a voice on the affordability, choice and access to food.
The first phase of the campaign will promote a national survey, both on and offline, which will ask the public’s opinion on food concerns:
For more information and to take part in the survey visit Citizens Advice Scotland’s website
One in ten people aged over 65 in the UK is malnourished or at risk of malnutrition. In Scotland, Eat Well Age Well are hoping to maximise the impact of the week and have recently launched their Small Ideas, Big Impact Fund which aims to encourage groups and individuals to test ideas that will prevent, detect and/ or treat malnutrition. They have also put together resources and a youtube video to raise awareness of the signs of malnutrition and what to do about it.
The Children’s Future Food Inquiry have published new analysis which compares the cost of Public Health England’s ‘Eatwell Guide’ with household expenditure across the UK, examining the affordability of a healthy diet in each of the UK’s four nations. The paper looks closely at how food affordability gaps affect children in the UK, and highlights the number of children who are living in households that are unlikely to be able to afford the recommended diet. The report and accompanying infographic can be downloaded from the Food Foundation website.
The first Malnutrition Awareness Week will be taking place in October. In Scotland Eat Well Age Well are hoping to maximise the impact of the week and are looking for community groups and other agencies to join them in raising awareness, tackling myths and sharing information. More information available from the Eat Well Age Well website.
The Dignity in Practice programme, delivered by Nourish Scotland and the Poverty Truth Commission, begins again this autumn. More details and application forms for this practice development programme for community groups interested in promoting and enhancing dignity in responses to food insecurity are available from the Nourish website.
‘… and maybe that dish isn’t identical the next time you make it, as you use your emotions when you cook ...’
Neil Forbes, Chef (from twitter)
One of my friends thinks I’m a great cook. I’m not really – average at best. I can do the basics – and I have perfected things that I particularly like to suit my own taste (my lentil soup is legend).
Living on my own I don’t always have the motivation to cook for myself. I used to eat a lot of ready meals and I still eat a lot of baked potatoes, but these days I try a bit harder and see what I can make from what I have in the fridge and cupboards more. It doesn’t always work out as planned and I’m prone to spillages, knife slippages and the occasional tea towel fire. But if I’m in the right mood, that’s all fine.
I’ve learned not to cook in a bad mood .. on those days when you feel that you have to make something; the ingredients are there and need to be used, but you really don’t feel like it. That soup tastes bitter and a little bit angry. Better to try again another day and have some good mood soup on standby in the freezer.
So back to my friend who loves my cooking. I really enjoy cooking for friends and family, planning the menu, choosing the right ingredients and doing the shopping. And then the actual cooking, getting into the zone while looking forward to the chat and the simple pleasure of feeding people. These are the meals that turn out the best.
‘I think for a lot of people .. when you have more people, you make more effort because it’s about making people happy, and you want people to enjoy it.’
Young mum from Borders Healthy Living Network (speaking on a video report on community-led research into food security and insecurity, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubXL8lvVcZ4&feature=youtu.be)
Anyone who knows me well will have heard me say that my mum was a great baker. This is not so much a proud boast as an emotional outburst. We never talked about it, but I like to think that this was something that she did for herself and not just for us. That when the chores were done, she took time for herself to do something she loved, thinking fondly of her absent schoolgirls, and that was what made her scones rise and her cakes sweet.
Bringing up four children on benefits and latterly a cleaner’s wage, mealtimes could be a bit different. The joy of cooking with a free choice of ingredients and not worrying about the cost was not always an option then. When she was working in the evening, us older girls were in charge of dinner. We ate more than a few burnt chips (bad mood chips) and crispy pancakes. But that’s when we also learned our basics.
Cooking for one may sometimes be enjoyable or may sometimes be a chore, but cooking for others should hopefully feel and taste like joy.
Alice Baird
alice.baird1@nhs.net
Earlier this year, around 50 people, many who run or manage cooking skills activities came together to hear evidence about the impact of community co
oking activities.
They heard from Professor Martin Caraher (City, University of London) and Dr Ada Garcia (University of Glasgow). Lyndsay Clark (Fife Health & Social Care Partnership) and I discussed the results from the CFHS cooking skills study group realist evaluation.
Here’s some information that will cheer up anyone looking for evidence of the impact of community cooking skills courses:
Cooking skills study group realist evaluation
This evaluation gave us information about 75 adults (51 women and 24 men) who took part in community cooking skills courses across Scotland. Our findings showed that:
You can find out more about the results of our evaluation in ‘chopping and changing’, including what worked, why and who for.
Professor Martin Caraher discussed the history and politics of cooking skills classes as well evidence. He reminded us that concern about people on low-incomes lacking cooking skills is not new – it was raised in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, lack of cooking skills is not unique to people living on low incomes. Martin’s views (gathered and researched over many years) of the impact of community cooking activities included:
You find out more about Martin’s work and read some of his publications here.
Dr Ada Garcia reported on the findings from the second stage of evaluating the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde eat better, feel better programme. Many of the people taking part in the programme were mothers (or carers) with children living at home. 296 people completed pre and post course evaluation questionnaires and 67 people completed pre course questionnaires and follow up interviews (around 10 months later). Ada’s findings included:
You can find out more about Ada’s work and read some of her articles (including the first stage of the eat better, feel better evaluation) here.
Practitioners views of the impact of community cooking:
Those attending our event wrote down their ‘hurrah’ moments: their successes from running cooking activities. The biggest response (10 people) were successes that related to social outcomes, building confidence or engaging with people, for example:
‘Whilst chopping veg, a young [vulnerable] guy found the courage and felt safe to talk to me about his hopes and fears for the future after a chaotic past..’
Four people wrote about participants moving onto volunteering roles, such as:
‘when participants who have never cooked much before can do so much at the end of the class! And then go and volunteer their new cooking skills to help others..’
And others wrote about people using their newly acquired cooking skills, enjoying new foods or about supporting staff in other organisations to run cooking sessions.
*this included people with mental health support needs or learning disabilities, people experiencing homelessness or in recovery from addictions, and others.
A number of community food initiatives contributed to discussions around new public health priorities and these can now be downloaded from the Scottish Government website.
Between August 2017 and March 2018 we worked with a small group of community cafes to look at self-evaluation. Together they developed a list of community cafe outcomes to reflect the range of differences cafes can make for their customers, volunteers and community members.
Six of the cafés involved carried out self-evaluation activities in the last few months. They came together in February to talk about the café outcomes they decided to focus their self-evaluation on, the evaluation tools and methods they used, and what they found out.
Case studies about each of the community café’s evaluations and findings can be found in the links below:
The Community Food Stop
Kates Kitchen
North Edinburgh Arts
The Open Door
The Sycamore Tree Café
Windmills Cafe
A summary of the key points around being involved in the programme, gathered from the six cafes, can be found below, as well as some hints and tips for evaluating community cafes.
Key points from self-evaluation programme
Evaluation hints and tips
Around 40 community food initiatives took part in an event on 7 March, run jointly by CFHS and Senscot. A community food social enterprise network session was held in the morning, and a community retailers ‘sharing good practice’ session in the afternoon.
The morning session looked at issues that community food social enterprises (or aspiring social enterprises) were currently experiencing, and possible solutions to overcoming these, summarised here.
The afternoon session focussed on what was happening within the community retailing sector. Again, some of the discussion focused on issues, but the session also identified opportunities for community retailers and community retailing, as highlighted in the session’s notes.
Despite the Arctic conditions and transport systems in chaos, practitioners, policy makers and researchers from across Scotland and beyond met in Glasgow for this latest get together looking at measurement of food poverty and how this understanding can be best applied within policy and practice.
Organised by NHS Health Scotland jointly with A Menu for Change, a presentation on their research ambitions from Mary Anne Macleod was accompanied by a broader look at the subject area from Dr Martin Caraher, Prof of Food Policy at City University, London and a panel discussion on gaps and opportunities led by representatives from Pilton Community Health Project, Central and West Integration Network and the Scottish Government.
Presentations from Mary Anne and Martin, as well as notes on the rich discussion that followed, are available at the links below.
Mary Anne Macleod presentation
Martin Caraher presentation
Discussion notes
‘Take Five’ was the fifth national community café networking event run by/with Community Food and Health (Scotland). Around 30 people took part.
Our event was held in City of Edinburgh Methodist Church (which runs the Well Café, a community café), and included workshops, activities and lots of time for networking.
We began with a short ‘laughter energiser‘ by Joyworks to give everyone the chance to meet people there, find out how laughter can make us feel better, and to do something silly.
Our first workshop, George and Leonardo came to town, gave everybody a chance to blow their trumpet, share what they would tell others is great about their cafe and what they wouldn’t want others to know about.
What’s great?
What would they want to hide from others?
Our second workshop, sharing and learning, discussed four topics:
Reaching out to our community
Recruiting, supporting and retaining our volunteers
Providing good, affordable, healthy food
Promoting what we do
At the end of the event, everyone was asked to let us know ‘What now/what next?’. They told us they wanted:
We sent a short survey to the all the participants a few weeks after the event. They were asked to let us know what had been the most useful part of ‘Take Five’, if they were doing anything differently now, and if they’d been in touch with anyone they’d met. We heard back from seven of those that were there. They told us:
“It was informative …..took away a lot of good ideas about what community cafes are doing.”
(We realised) the community food work that (X’s) volunteers are doing does fit into the definition of a community cafe and how important this is to communities. We are also keen to be part of a network (…) in our area.”
“(Take Five) might allow me to support work with community cafes in (Y), share what cafes are doing elsewhere and what has and hasn’t worked.”
“(We understand) how we can measure what we are doing even though it is quite intangible. (We are going to be) more mindful of our impact (and about) recording our performance.”
Finally …
Many thanks to:
City of Edinburgh Methodist Church for the venue and catering.
Sharon and her colleague from Joyworks for the ‘laughter energiser workshop’.
Sally Findlay from Edinburgh Community for all help before and on the day.
Colleagues from CFHS and NHS Health Scotland for their hard work on the day.
Two new publications about community retailing are now available.
Strengthening the future of community retailing is an accessible summary of research carried out for us in 2016 by the University of Stirling’s Institute for Retail Studies. It looked at the sustainability of community retailing. It includes the research’s key findings and recommendations.
Staying power compares the findings and recommendations from five pieces of research around community retailing that were produced between 2006 and 2016. It also considers developments in community retailing in the last 10 years, and suggest how barriers to developing more collaborative working could be overcome.
Both publications can be found in our library.
What is distinct about community-led research is that it includes community members as active participants in the whole research process. This means finding ways to share decision-making in what questions to ask, who to ask, how to ask, analysing what you find and making decisions about the future. This is research with communities as opposed to research on communities.
Of course, community-led research is not without its challenges: building partnerships, developing local skills, maintaining rigor and ethical practice, and, at a practical level, planning the time and resources needed.
But in my experience, the benefits far outweigh the costs:
I recently worked with CFHS on a study of food insecurity that they commissioned using this approach. Including the voice of communities and learning from their direct experience was fundamental for learning about a more nuanced and diverse lived experience. CFHS recognised that it was not enough to know how many people accessed food banks, we needed to dig deeper. What about the people who don’t use food banks but are living on the edge, teetering on a thin line between just okay and not okay? What were their experiences and what strategies did they use to help them to cope? These questions pose a challenge for researchers, not least, how to get to the heart of authentic lived experience. Enter community-led research and its principles of inclusion and participation. My role was to support three community partners and their teams of community researchers to undertake this community-led research. It was at times challenging, deeply rewarding and lots of fun to work alongside the talented community researchers, and for more about our stories….
Find out What three communities in Scotland learned about food insecurity.
Learn How to develop a community-led research project.
Read our published article Reflections on using a community-led research methodology to explore experiences of living with food insecurity.
Sustainable Food Cities and the Food Research Collaborative has commissioned research to map the types of food hubs that exist, or are planned, in the UK. If you are involved in a food hub, or in setting one up, the researchers are inviting you to complete a survey.
NHS Health Scotland has released new findings about public-attitudes-to-reducing-obesity-in-Scotland. ScotCen Social Research’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, carried out in 2016, included a module of 40 questions (developed in consultation with NHS Health Scotland) to find out what people think about obesity and how to tackle it. The survey found that people did not always recognise obesity in themselves or others. But, most people recognised the health harms of obesity and there was substantial public support for actions to reduce it. For example, most Scottish people support action to reduce the levels of sugar, fat and salt in food.
We have been working with a group of community cafes to look at self-evaluation. Together they have developed a list of community cafe outcomes to reflect the range of differences cafes can make for their customers, volunteers and community members. We shared these with workshop delegates at ‘Sharing Patter’, our annual networking conference in November 2017, who confirmed these outcomes reflected the sense and reality of work across the sector.
The outcomes reflect that every community café operates differently ( e.g. why they were set up, when they are open, how they are staffed and financed), but draw out the most common themes.
We collated some notes from our sessions with the group on Evaluating impact to help remind them about self-evaluation topics we discussed. The notes also includes links to other resources. Both these items may be useful for other community cafes or those planning to run one:
Outside the Box has launched ‘Tips for older vegetarian and vegans’, as part of its Food Buddies programme. The tips include lots of suggestions, ideas and recipes for older people (including those affected by dementia) or for other that are supporting or working with older people.
The publication can be accessed through this link: https://otbds.org/snowy-launch-tips-older-vegetarians-vegans/
CFHS is holding another ‘sharing good practice’ session for community retailers on 30 January in the Scottish Youth Theatre in Glasgow from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. (at the latest). Anyone running a food co-op, fruit and veg stall or fruit barra is very welcome to come along. The meeting’s being held to give everyone another opportunity to meet up, share what’s working well (and not so well) for them, and raise and discuss ideas around strengthening community retailing. If you’d like to take part, or want more information, please contact Anne.
We have some funding remaining in our Capacity Building Fund. The closing date for applying has been extended to Friday 26 January. If you want to apply, please read the Fund’s guidance notes before doing so. These, and the online application form can found in our Funding section. For more information, contact Anne
The CFHS annual networking conference took place on 25 October in Glasgow. Thank you to all those that attended and contributed to this ‘sharing patter’ event, particularly to our speakers: Brenda Black: Equality Nutrition; Michael Craig: NHS Health Scotland; Dr Andrea Tonner: University of Strathclyde; and to our chair: Susan Kennedy: NHS Forth Valley.
Delegates took part in a range of workshops and had plenty of opportunities to network and share patter.
Powerpoint presentations from the speakers and the workshops are available below:
Speakers
Sharing: improving community outcomes – Brenda Black, Equality Nutrition
Using food to share patter and using patter to make connections – Dr Andrea Tonner, University of Strathclyde
Workshops
Partnership working
Sharing an enthusiasm for cooking skills
Common grounds on community cafes
Menu for Change: cash, rights, food
Good food nation: a growing response
– Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens
– Peebles CAN
– Woodlands Community Garden
Growing your social media presence
Diet and obesity strategy: current thinking
Sugar Smart
Older people and food
Forty-two voluntary and community groups have this week been allocated funding by CFHS to promote and deliver healthy eating initiatives.
Food and diet play a major role in health and wellbeing, but not everyone can access good food. People on low incomes and those living in poorer areas have less opportunity to eat a healthy diet and are more likely to experience poor health as a result. One reason for this is that there might not be affordable healthy food options available where they live. CFHS, part of NHS Health Scotland, aims to ensure that everyone in Scotland has the opportunity, ability and confidence to access a healthy and acceptable diet for themselves, their families and their communities. This funding helps to make that happen.
Each of the groups has been allocated between £500 and £2000. Working in low-income communities across Scotland, they will use the funding to develop a range of practical healthy eating initiatives, including; cookery courses, community gardens and community café projects.
These groups have been awarded funding
Ayrshire and Arran
Beith Trust, BEITH
Grant awarded: £1,850.00
Purpose: cook it project
Borders
Hawick Congregational Community Church, Jedburgh
Grant awarded: £1,000.00
Purpose: Try and taste
Dumfries and Galloway
Langholm Playcare Ltd, LANGHOLM
Grant awarded: £500.00
Purpose: Fun with Healthy Foods
Fife
Fife Gingerbread – Making it Work, Leven
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: Looking after your families wellbeing on a budget
Treetop Family Nurture Centre, INVERKEITHING
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: Top Nosh
Gallatown Nursery, KIRKCALDY
Grant awarded: £722.00
Purpose: Family food project
Rosyth Community Projects Ltd, Rosyth
Grant awarded: £1,980.00
Purpose: Pop up pizza night
Grampian
Garioch Community Kitchen, Inverurie
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: Family Fun in the Kitchen
Banchory and District Initiative Ltd, Banchory
Grant awarded: £1,932.00
Purpose: Confidence to Cook at Number One
Alcohol and Drugs Action, Aberdeen
Grant awarded: £808.00
Purpose: food with friends
CFINE (Community Food Initiatives North East), Aberdeen
Grant awarded: £1,810.00
Purpose: Tuk In (Mobile Community Café)
Lothian
1st Step, BRIGHTONS
Grant awarded: £1,574.00
Purpose: 1st Step Learn to Grow
Edinburgh Cyrenians Good Food, Edinburgh
Grant awarded: £1,919.02
Purpose: Something to Eat, Someone to eat with
Open Door Accommodation Project, Edinburgh
Grant awarded: £1,600.00
Purpose: healthy living on a budget group
Edinburgh Community Food, Edinburgh
Grant awarded: £1,930.00
Purpose: Street Fit Scotland- Eating for Health
Wester Hailes Youth Agency, Edinburgh
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: Cooking Club at the Drop in
Children 1st – Tackling Money Worries, Bathgate
Grant awarded: £500.00
Purpose: Fun, Fit & “Foody” @ COZ
Nari Kallyan Shango, Edinburgh
Grant awarded: £1,800.00
Purpose: Healthy eating on a budget
Inspiring Scotland – Link Up Craigmillar, Edinburgh
Grant awarded: £1,938.00
Purpose: Craigmillar’s Fresh Friday’s Food Truck
North Berwick Management Committee, North Berwick
Grant awarded: £1,548.00
Purpose: Good Food Good Health
Orkney
Lifestyles Service, Kirkwall
Grant awarded: £1,898.61
Purpose: Flourish
Shetland
Young Mums Group, Lerwick
Grant awarded: £500.00
Purpose: Cooking on a Budget
Tayside
Stride, Dundee
Grant awarded: £1,967.00
Purpose: STRIDE fruit and garden veg project
NHS Tayside, Dundee
Grant awarded: £500.00
Purpose: Community Cooking (Learning Disability)
Forth valley
Strathard Community Trust, Stirling
Grant awarded: £1,245.00
Purpose: Healthy 18, Make 2018 the healthiest yet. Lets start now!
Hawkhill Community Association, ALLOA
Grant awarded: £1,240.00
Purpose: Hawkhill Journey of Food (a journey to better health)
Greater Glasgow and Clyde
South East Area Lifestyles Health Project, GLASGOW
Grant awarded: £1,840.00
Purpose: simple cooking with primary children
RAMH, PAISLEY
Grant awarded: £1,500.00
Purpose: healthy eating on a budget
Community Connections, DALMUIR
Grant awarded: £830.51
Purpose: come cook with me
Youth Community Support Agency, GLASGOW
Grant awarded: £1,500.00
Purpose: cooking with confidence
Engage Me CIC, Glasgow
Grant awarded: £1,988.16
Purpose: engage: good food
North Glasgow Community Food Initiative, Glasgow
Grant awarded: £1,530.00
Purpose: Sugar Smart Campaign in North of Glasgow
The People’s Development Trust, Glasgow
Grant awarded: £1,341.00
Purpose: Edible Garden
Community Central Hall, Glasgow
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: garden to the table – intergenerational cookery support
East End Kids & Co, Glasgow
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: children eat well workshops
North West Women’s Centre, Glasgow
Grant awarded: £1,721.60
Purpose: Mum’s and Children Grow Together
Highland
Kintyre Youth Café, CAMPBELTOWN
Grant awarded: £1,800.00
Purpose: Here and There
South Kintyre Development Trust, CAMPBELTOWN
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: Quarry Green Garden
Merkinch Community Centre, INVERNESS
Grant awarded: £730.00
Purpose: ‘I can cook myself’ project
Lanarkshire
Pathfinder Guide Dog Programme (Pathfinder Dogs), Wishaw
Grant awarded: £2,000.00
Purpose: Cooking Blind Workshops
Windmills Lanarkshire Ltd, Motherwell
Grant awarded: £1,540.20
Purpose: Eat Right Be Bright
Healthy Valleys, LANARK
Grant awarded: £1,902.38
Purpose: Lockhart Community Kitchen
A government policy document a few years ago noted that, “Scotland has both a remarkable legacy as well as an admirable current resource in its social enterprises, community and voluntary sector.”
Why?
No-one likes to reinvent the wheel, be told by another project after hitting a snag that they could have told them where the pitfalls lay, learn about a funding source or training opportunity after the deadline or miss an opportunity to bring evidence they have generated to the attention of key planners and policy makers.
How?
The country’s community food initiatives, despite focusing on local circumstances and experiencing increasing demand on their services, have always shown an enthusiasm to share their experience and evidence with both peers and policy makers.
Face to face, increasingly complemented by new technology and social media, Scotland’s community cafes, food co-ops, cooking classes and community gardens, operating in a variety of locations and circumstances, share evidence and opinions, information and insight, aspirations and frustrations. A critical friend who won’t shirk from telling things as they find them.
They won’t always agree with you, or each other, but collectively gauge the nature and scale of the challenges alongside the appetite and capacity for change.
Where?
I have always been delighted that our annual conference has attracted a mixed audience of volunteers, project staff, local authority/NHS fieldworkers, planners, policy makers and academics because that is the sectors, levels and disciplines that need to hear what each other have to say (places at this year’s event going fast!).
Reflecting after its first five years of operating, CFHS (or the Scottish Community Diet Project as it was known then) concluded that,“Community action is only one part of the national strategies on diet, health and social inclusion adopted by government. It adds however a crucial ingredient to the development and delivery of these and other interlinked policy agendas and could add even more, given the right support and encouragement.”
Fifteen years on the very well-intentioned desire, locally and nationally, to take a planned, joined-up and outcome-driven approach to food, health and inequalities can look at times to some like a plate of strategic spaghetti. It would be disastrous however if local communities felt discouraged with, or disassociated from, policy and strategy development. The effective conversion of policy into practice requires practice to be informing policy, within which the collective memory, emerging evidence and current experience of Scotland’s communities is a vital part of the recipe.
Please note that our annual networking conference is now fully booked.
Delegates can look forward to tasty presentations, lots of table talk and plenty to take away from our popular annual networking event for volunteers, practitioners, planners and academics addressing issues around food, health and inequalities with Scotland’s communities.
With an interesting mix of workshops, and two very knowledgeable speakers, who will use their considerable experience in the worlds of research and practice to explore the notion of sharing evidence and expertise between communities, between sectors and between disciplines, you will also have opportunities for networking and discussion and sharing your experiences with others.
The programme and workshop descriptions can be accessed at the links below.
Conference programme
Workshop descriptions
We look forward to seeing you there.
If, yes, please consider completing our survey. If your organisation has more than one person who runs cooking skills activities on behalf of your organisation, please consider choosing just one person to complete it.
Please complete our survey if you can answer ‘yes’ to each of the following three questions:
Why we are doing this survey
We would like to get a basic snapshot of how many organisations or practitioners throughout Scotland run community cooking skills activities, who they run them for and some brief information about how they run them. We will report on what we find out from the survey later in 2017. We provide this information to both policy makers and practitioners.
£30 for five organisations that complete the survey
As a ‘thank you’ for completing the survey we will randomly pick 5 organisations’ names from the completed survey responses after the survey closes. Each one picked will receive a £30 ‘love to shop’ voucher to be used for their organisation’s cooking skills activity.
Please provide your contact details if you would like your organisation to have a chance of receiving a voucher. The survey closes on Friday 1 September at 5 pm.
The survey can be accessed at http://surveys.healthscotland.com/index.php/545795/lang-en
Would you like your cafe to be able to demonstrate the difference it’s making to your staff, volunteers, customers and community? Would you like to be involved in developing a range of tools that other cafes can use to evaluate the impact of their work as well?
Community Food and Health (Scotland) is looking for six community cafes to take part in our new community cafe self-evaluation programme, running between August 2017 and August 2018. The cafes taking part will meet up for three one-day sessions to:
The cafes taking part will also be expected to carry out some tasks between each of the sessions. Cafes wanting to take part will need to:
Flexible, bespoke support from CFHS will be available for the cafes taking part. These will also receive a donation of £500 towards additional costs incurred as a result of taking part (CFHS will discuss what the funding may be used for with participating cafes).
We will begin recruiting for the programme in June, but please contact anne.gibson5@nhs.net before then if you’re interested in taking part.
In total, 38 voluntary and community groups have been allocated development funding by Community Food and Health Scotland, allowing them to promote and deliver healthy eating initiatives. CFHS, part of NHS Health Scotland, aims to ensure that everyone in Scotland has the opportunity, ability and confidence to access a healthy and acceptable diet for themselves, their families and their communities.
Each of the groups has been allocated between £500 and £2000.
The voluntary and community groups working in low-income communities across Scotland will use the funding to develop a wide range of practical healthy eating related activities. This includes a wide range of cookery courses, community gardens and community café projects. The groups were chosen to receive funding to support their work under the CFHS scheme which is funded by Scottish Government.
Gerry McLaughlin, Chief Executive of NHS Health Scotland said,
“Small amounts of funding can make a big difference to Scottish communities. These groups are using this funding to actively tackle health inequalities and address barriers to availability of healthy food, as well as affordability, skills and culture. Healthy eating groups are a great way to bring people together to share ideas and learn about healthy eating. We are pleased to be supporting such a large number of groups across the country.”
Minister for Public Health and Sport, Aileen Campbell said,
“If we can support people to eat healthier diets then they are more likely to live longer, healthier lives. Whether it’s a cookery class, a café or a grow your own initiative, these small community projects, funded by Community Food and Health Scotland, are helping encourage and support people to gain the knowledge and skills they need to eat more healthily.”
Ends
Media enquiries should be directed to NHS Health Scotland’s Communications and Engagement Team on 07500 854574 or nhs.HealthScotland-Communications@nhs.net
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Notes to Editor
Community Food and Health (Scotland) – formerly known as the Scottish Community Diet Project, was established in 1996 and was based within Consumer Focus Scotland before joining NHS Health Scotland in 2013.
Booking is now open for CFHS’s latest community café learning visits, on 24 March in Edinburgh. The visits are open to anyone involved in or with a community café. The aim of the visits is to bring together café staff, volunteers, board / committee members or support / development workers to learn about how other community cafes work – and share their own experiences.
The visits are to two well-known community cafes in Edinburgh, both members of Edinburgh Community Café Network – Open Door Café in Morningside (from 11.30 am to 12.45 pm) and Café on the Corner in the New Town (from 3 – 4 pm). Places can be booked to visit one or both cafes. A maximum of 8 places are available for both visits.
To book a place/places, or for more information about the visits, please email or phone Anne, anne.gibson5@nhs.net , 0131 314 5428, by Friday 10 March.
In December 2016, at Serenity Café in Edinburgh, a workshop was held sharing learning about, and reflecting on, work that is currently taking place in Scotland and in the rest of the UK on the issue of household food insecurity measurement.
The day was supported by NHS Health Scotland, the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS): Scottish Government, and the Institute of Applied Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen.
The presentations from the day are available at the links below.
Introduction and RESAS update presentation
Rachel Loopstra (Kings College London) presentation
Jill Morton (Scottish Government) presentation
Rebecca O’Connell (European Research Council) presentation
The CFHS annual networking conference took place on 26 October in Edinburgh. Thank you to those who attended and contributed to the day, particularly to our speakers, Martyn Evans, Chief Executive, Carnegie Trust UK, and Ewan Aitken, Chief Executive Officer, Cyrenians, and to our Chair, Iain Stewart, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Community Food.
The conference was an opportunity for people to come together, learn from each other and share experience on all aspects of food, inequality and social justice. After the speakers and a morning workshop, delegates had the opportunity to take part in dedicated networking activities in the afternoon, and were joined in this by the Minister for Public Health and Sport.
The theme of the day was kindness, and taking a dignified and compassionate approach to food insecurity.
Presentations from the day are available below.
Kindness in the community pilots: Martyn Evans
Something to eat, someone to eat with – video presentation: Ewan Aitken
Workshop: community-led research
Workshop: turning knowledge into action
Workshop: collaborative working
Research reports from our three community partners – Central and West Integration Network, Linwood Community Development Trust, and Borders Healthy Living Network are now available. Borders Healthy Living Network has also produced a video, which can be found below.
The research aimed to explore aspirations of food security and experience of food insecurity from people who do not routinely access food banks. The headline, if unsurprising, news is that while people know what is and aspire to eating a healthy diet their day-to-day experience is often constrained by low levels of disposable income. This affects their ability to afford healthy, adequate or culturally appropriate food, and the costs of travel to access it. Across the spectrum of food insecurity (severe, moderate or mild) people “cope” in a myriad of ways. These span from individual strategies such as eating only when hungry and skipping meals to budgeting and shopping strategies like buying cheaper less healthy food, using frozen veg to avoid waste or shopping at different times to access on the day reductions. People’s level of food insecurity also changes throughout their life course, with changes in employment status, household composition and other factors.
The researchers found that people can be reluctant to admit the level of their food insecurity, indeed one group found that some respondents thought they were doing okay, when their experiences would suggest mild levels of food insecurity.
A common facet reflected across each of the research teams was that sharing and coming together with others to eat was highlighted as an important and valued aspect of food security.
You can find the reports below and we have also supported the groups to produce infographics from the research findings.
BHLN infographic
BHLN research report
BHLN video
CWIN infographic
CWIN research report
Linwood infographic
Linwood research report
Working with Evaluation Consultant, Lesley Greenaway, we have produced a set of resources on developing a community-led research project. These can be found in the Research section.
Registration is now open for our annual networking event in Edinburgh on 26 October 2016.
The conference programme is now available, together with details of the workshop sessions.
Gail is a member of the CFHS cooking skills study group on behalf of both NHS Forth Valley and Edinburgh Community Food. Her role at both is to manage and deliver cooking skills courses, but each organisation runs these differently. Gail explains the challenges and advantages for both her learning and as part of the study group:
“Taking part in the cooking skills study group as part of two organisations requires two different approaches which are proving to be both equally valuable and challenging experiences.
My experience of taking part on behalf of Edinburgh Community Food (ECF) has been different to the NHS in that I have a more proactive “hands on” role in delivering cooking groups. For the purpose of the study group, I have been concentrating on running courses for parents/carers’ living on a low income, attending Early Years Centres across Edinburgh.
As part of the study group we must decide what will happen to the food made at each course session, so that we can see if this makes any difference across the study group courses and for whom. I have chosen to encourage participants to taste some of the food whilst attending the course session with the remainder being taken home to share with family members.
Assessing the impact of this has been challenging in several respects, for example: some participants are reluctant to try the food. I’ve managed to overcome this by tailoring the recipes to family meals and foods which they think their children would like, and creating a good atmosphere to encourage parents to try dishes. There are also benefits to running courses within Early Years’ centres, including:
Within NHS Forth Valley, our role in the cooking skills study requires a more “hands off approach”, because it focuses on enabling organisations to deliver cooking groups for themselves. We provide support through training and resources. For the purpose of the study group we have taken on the role of observing courses run by other organisations, noting any changes which participants make over the course and compiling the evaluation material. This has been challenging in many ways:
In spite of these challenges, it has been useful for me to be able to take a step back and learn from other practitioners and their methods of delivering cooking groups. It has allowed me to take note and observe changes, and pick up on participants’ comments which, usually engrossed in the cooking group I may not have normally noticed.
Working for two organisations being involved in the study has been a big learning curve and has developed my skills as a practitioner. It has also helped ensure that the outcomes for participants are strong and measurable and our evaluation materials are as robust as possible making evaluation an easier process. It has made me consider and question in more depth the reasons why I chose to run cooking groups the way I do, and also the importance in having a ‘third party’ (or significant other) figure that is able to support parents in between cooking sessions and provide positive reinforcement.
GHutchison@edinburghcommunityfood.org.uk
CFHS is holding three more community café learning visits, on 4, 12 and 19 October. The three community cafes hosting the visits – the Annexe Café, Windmills Café and Fly Cup Catering – have been running successfully for several years. The aim of the visit is to provide opportunities for café staff, volunteers and managers meet other café practitioners, and share ideas and good practice.
Places on all the visits are available for anyone involved in running or setting up a community café (staff, volunteers, managers or board/management committee members) or those who support people with learning disabilities and plan to develop food activities as part of their work (particularly the visits to Windmills Cafe and Fly Cup Catering).
The visit on 4 October is to the Annexe Café in Glasgow. The café is part of Annexe Communities, an organisation which provides health and wellbeing initiatives in West Glasgow, especially for people facing social disadvantage. The visit starts at 12 p.m. with lunch. 8 places are available. Annexe Café is very close to Kelvinhall and Partick Underground stations, and Partick train station.
The visit on 12 October is to Windmills Café in Motherwell town centre. The café was established to provide meaningful work experience and training for young adults aged 18-25 that have a learning disability. It provides a 3-year training opportunity which included catering, employment experience and employment placements. The trainees are involved in all aspects of running the café. The visit starts at 10.15 a.m. and lunch is provided. 20 places are available. Windmills Café is a few minutes’ walk from Motherwell Train Station: there is also ample car parking close by.
The visit on 19 October is to Fly Cup Catering in Inverurie. Based in an industrial area on the edge of the town, it runs a busy café, outside catering, and produces bakery goods which are sold through local businesses. Fly Cup Catering was also established to provide opportunities for adults with learning disabilities. The visit starts at 11 a.m. Lunch is also provided. 8 places are available. If required, transport will be arranged from and to Inverurie Train Station.
To book a place, please email Anne, anne.gibson5@nhs.net, 0131 314 5428.
One of the topics that I would like to find out more about is: What are the most successful type of recipes for community cooking skills courses?
‘Success’ for members of our cooking skills study group means recipes that are cooked again at home by participants, (and preferably repeatedly).
What’s the best way to choose the recipes?
Many of the practitioners in our study group encourage participants to choose the recipes they’d like to learn, often at the beginning of a course, and sometimes from a set of existing ‘healthy’ recipes. (Some of the recipes they use can be found here)
There is some evidence that health promotion interventions (such as many cooking skills courses) may be more likely to be effective if these include allowing participants to influence the activities and if activities are ‘relevant’ to participants. Asking participants to choose recipes seems like an obvious way to ensure both of these things, but there are several reasons that may mean you have to compromise on this approach, including:
Whether participants choose the recipes or you do, participants might still face challenges that mean they are less likely to use the recipe again on a regular basis, such as:
If your cooking skills courses have different aims or outcomes to our study group, these challenges may be less of a problem. For example, if your course focuses more on social cooking, or it aims to develop catering skills, it might be less important that participants use ingredients that are familiar, or that the recipes are more complex.
The main message here is – what are the main outcomes that you are trying to achieve with your cooking skills courses? Are the recipes you are using best suited to these, and are they likely to suit the needs and wishes of participants? It might be a challenge to choose the best recipes to suit everyone, particularly when many groups are only able to run very short courses or can only learn a small selection of recipes, but if you have success with just one or two recipes, this may be enough to achieve some of your outcomes.
Wednesday 26 October 2016
Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh
Food, health and inequality – taking a compassionate and dignified approach. Come and share your knowledge and experience, hopes and concerns, with volunteers, fieldworkers, planners, policy makers and academics from across Scotland and beyond.
We have already engaged a number of stakeholders in the planning of this event, but if you have any suggestions, from a new resource you have developed to a valuable experience you would like to share, please let us know and we will try to accommodate as much as possible into the day. For more information about how you can be involved, please contact alice.baird1@nhs.net
Registration opens in September 2016. A full programme will be available at that time.
Our cooking skills study group recently met together and shared ideas about running effective cooking skills courses. One topic they discussed was the role of ‘significant others’ attending courses. That is (for example), family members attending with their child, or support workers attending alongside the person they support. Significant others can help (or hinder) the aims of your course both whilst attending your course and outside it.
Whilst attending your course, significant others can be a great source of help. They could:
After the course, or between course sessions, the role of significant others is crucial, as they may spend more time with the participant than you do. They could:
Members of our cooking skills study group had various experiences of ‘significant others’ attending cooking courses. Less positive experiences included support workers discouraging participants and parents disagreeing with nutrition messages or suggesting their child won’t like certain foods (within the hearing of the child). Getting significant others on-board with the aims of the course or agreeing ground rules before it begins may help avoid these challenges – people may not always be aware of the impact of their behaviour.
Our cooking skills review carried out by Avril Blamey and Jacki Gordon in 2014 confirms the importance of the role of ‘significant others’, or anyone else who can positively ‘reinforce’ learning, skills and messages (see page 69) They also confirm that social norms (such as descriptive and subjective norms) may have a role to play in encouraging participants, for example:
In 2015 CFHS commissioned research to identify the factors that affect the sustainability of community retailers (food co-ops, fruit and vegetable stalls and barras and community shops). The research was completed in Autumn 2016.
A summary of the research findings and recommendations will be available late summer/early autumn 2017.
CFHS is planning more community cafe learning visits this year. The visits give community cafe practitioners opportunities to find out about other community cafes, meet others working in, running or supporting community cafes, and share good practice.
Details of the first visit will be available soon. For more information about the visits, contact anne.gibson5@nhs.net
Community Food and Health (Scotland) is holding another community café networking event on Thursday 1 September, in the Pearce Institute in Glasgow from 11 am to 3.30 pm. Anyone working in or with a community café – volunteer, staff member, manager, or board / management committee member – is welcome to apply for a place at our event. Our event is free, and lunch and other refreshments are provided. Places can be booked through the link below. The closing date for applications is Friday 19 August.
The programme will include lots of time for networking, a choice of workshops and discussion groups (bookable on the day), and activities for everyone to take part in. The topics for the workshops and discussion groups will include promoting cafés (locally, area-wide and nationally), the healthyliving award, customer service, evidencing your cafes impact, and more…..the final programme will be available nearer the time.
The Pearce Institute is very easy to reach by public transport or car (there is ample parking nearby).
Community Food and Health (Scotland) has an annual development fund open to groups and agencies in Scotland who would like to improve access to, and take up of, a healthy, varied and balanced diet. Funding from £500 to £2000 is available. The closing date is Friday 5 August.
The conversation with the people of Scotland was an opportunity for Health Scotland to facilitate public engagement opportunities within a community setting. An opportunity for Health Scotland to capture opinion about a community people live, work and volunteer within, and a chance for the organisation to talk about a fairer, healthier Scotland with people in their own community.
Here is a chance to see and hear what the conversations were about. The three videos are available below.
NHS Health Scotland worked with Active communities, a community health project based in Paisley delivering and supporting physical, community sport and health and wellbeing across Renfrewshire. This video below shows a conversation with people living, working and volunteering in the Johnstone Castle area.
NHS Health Scotland worked with Dundee Healthy Living Initiative whose mission is to promote positive health and wellbeing by delivering health improvement activities as identified by local people. This video below shows a conversation with people living, working and volunteering in the Lochee area.
NHS Health Scotland worked with Borders Healthy Living Network, a network involved in food and health work, physical activity, mental health and volunteering. NHS Health Scotland also worked with Burnfoot Community Futures, a charity aiming to improve the well-being, quality of life and opportunities of the people of Hawick. The majority of people shown in the video do not live in Burnfoot but are associated with the local Healthy Living Network.
The processes involved and the conversation content has the potential to inform Health Scotland’s fairer and healthier work as well as informing the Scottish Government Creating a Fairer Scotland and Creating a Healthier Scotland conversations.
Following our recent seminar, “Food poverty: Measuring, monitoring and making a difference”, organised jointly with the Rowett Institute, the key speaker Prof Valerie Tarasuk, from the University of Toronto, has kindly given permission to make her fascinating presentation available for download.
CFHS’s next community café learning visit is on Tuesday 9 February, 11 am to 2.30 pm, to Wellmeadow Café in Blairgowrie and the Walled Garden Café in Perth.
Places are available to anyone involved in running or setting up a community café. Transport will be provided from Blairgowrie to Perth and back, if required and assistance with travel costs to Perth may be available.
For more details/to book places, contact anne.gibson5@nhs.net
NHS Health Scotland has today published its organisational position statement on food poverty.
The purpose of the paper is to outline NHS Health Scotland’s position on food poverty in Scotland. It is informed by our work at Community Food and Health (Scotland), to ensure that everyone in Scotland has the opportunity, ability and confidence to access a healthy and acceptable diet.
The statement is available from www.healthscotland.scot/
The deadline for applying to our Capacity Building Fund has been extended to Monday 15 February. Groups running community food and health activities can apply for up to £500 to run or take part in learning or training to bring new skills or expertise into their organisation and help strengthen it.
For more details, please contact anne.gibson5@nhs.net
A national networking conference for those involved with any aspect of community food.
A one-day event where people can learn and discuss national activity and local practice with people from all over Scotland.
An opportunity for people to come together, learn from each other and share experience, evidence, hopes and concerns on all aspects of food, inequality and social justice.
Programme and registration
A full programme will become available when registration opens in September 2015. The conference will focus on the impact community food activity can have on local practice and national policy developments.
From 1 April FSS, the new public sector body for Scotland takes over the responsibilities previously carried out in Scotland by the Food Standards Agency. Visit its new website for more information.
More than three quarters of young people buy food or drink beyond the school gate at least twice a week, according to a new report by a University of Hertfordshire research team. You can download the research report here.
Community Food Moray is carrying out a survey to find out about community food initiatives developing on-line services. They hope that community food initiatives will take a few minutes to complete it. For more information, contact Jo at Community Food Moray, info@communityfoodmoray.co.uk.
CFHS’s new publication about community food initiatives that are working to reduce food poverty through delivering a range of services is now available online. The publication includes examples of eight community food initiatives that are offering emergency food aid and more. The publication can be found here.
CFHS’s new publication summarises the early years activities of 18 groups and agencies it funded in 2013 through the CFHS development fund. The publication can be found here: Improving Maternal and Infant Nutrition: A Framework for Action.
The Eat Better Feel Better team would like to thank you for your ongoing support and help in promoting the Scottish Government’s Eat Better Feel Better Campaign. The campaign launched at the beginning of January, so hopefully you will have had a chance to spot some of the campaign assets on TV, radio, in local community centres or in your local supermarket.
More information about any aspect of the campaign please contact Claire Prentice.
CFHS’s first community cafe learning visit took place in November 2014. Six people took part in the visit, which included Theo’s Cafe in Orbiston Neighbourhood Centre in Bellshill, and Reidvale Community Cafe in Reidvale Neighbourhood Centre in Glasgow.
The visit was a great success, with lots of questions being asked and answered, hints and tips shared, photographs taken and email addresses exchanged, and some lovely food eaten.
Following the success of the first community café learning visit, two more visits are taking place early next year.
The first is on Thursday 22 January 12.30 – 4 p.m. and will include Punjabi Junction and North Edinburgh Art Centre Café. The second visit is on Thursday 19 February and will include Elgin Youth Centre.
For the first visit, transport from and to Edinburgh city centre, and lunch, are provided. For both visits we will also consider requests for help with travel costs to Glasgow.
To apply for a place for either visit, please contact anne.gibson5@nhs.net, 0131 314 5428 by Thursday 15 January.
CFHS welcomed nearly 200 people to our annual networking conference on 29 October in Glasgow this year. Thanks to all who attended, and whose contributions made it such a great day.
With a full programme of lively table discussions, inspiring speakers and presenters, and much networking, the event was captured by a photographer and graphic facilitator and some of these these images are now available, along with the presentations from the plenary and breakout sessions.
Morning speakers
Food poverty now: how can we get to a more just food society? Prof Liz Dowler
An appetite for life: encouraging eating as we age: Michelle McCrindle and Richard Lyall
The work of North Glasgow Community Food Initiative: Greig Sandilands
Breakout sessions
Evaluation: Healthier Scotland Cooking Bus
Social media: CHEX
BME community work: Scotia Clubhouse
BME community work: REACH community health project
Engagement and partnership working in a rural setting: Pointers
Community cafes: healthyliving award
Community cafes: CFHS
Engagement and partnership working in a rural setting: NHS Borders
Engagement and partnership working with vulnerable groups: Cyrenians
Engagement and partnership working with vulnerable groups: Brothers of Charity Services
Health inequalities and food poverty: Flora Douglas
Health inequalities and food poverty: Karolina Gombert
Community growing: FCFCG
Afternoon speaker
Scottish Government Eat Better Feel Better campaign: Susan Solomon
Images
Graphics: Graham Ogilvie
Graphic calendar: Graham Ogilvie
Photographs: Kenny Smith
A write up from the event will be available early next year.
We look forward to seeing you in 2015.
Registration is now open for our annual networking conference to be held at the Central Hotel in Glasgow, on 29 October.
The conference will be an opportunity for people to come together, learn from each other and share experience, evidence, hopes and concerns on all aspects of food, inequality and social justice. A day where people can learn and discuss national activity as well as local practice.
The conference will have an underlying theme of tackling health inequalities and promoting social justice through the medium of food. We aim to provide a valuable day for those involved in tackling health inequalities through community food activity.
The full programme for the day is available here.
CFHS is inviting applications from groups of community cafes that want to set up a community café network or run joint promotional activities. Groups of cafes can apply for up to £1000.
More details can be found here, or contact anne.gibson5@nhs.net
This year’s national networking conference will take place on Wednesday 29 October at the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow.
About the event
A national networking conference hosted by Community Food and Health (Scotland). A unique opportunity to network with community food colleagues.
A day where people can learn and discuss national activity as well as local practice. The conference will be an opportunity for people to come together, learn from each other and share experience, evidence, hopes and concerns on all aspects of food, inequality and social justice.
The conference will have an underlying theme of tackling health inequalities and promoting social justice through the medium of food. We aim to provide a valuable day for those involved in tackling health inequalities through community food activity.
Would you like to be involved on the day?
The conference planning group would like to give you the opportunity to showcase your work. Creative, innovative or challenging aspects of your practice from across Scotland presented in a way that suits you.
More information about how to be involved, please see the call for participation form or contact janeoliver1@nhs.net, 0141 414 2792.
Programme and registration
A full programme will become available when registration opens in August 2014.
Do you have cooking skills evaluation reports that are gathering dust and too few people to read them?
If your answer is yes, please can you help us? 100s of groups and agencies across Scotland run cooking activities for people in low-income communities. But there is very little publically available written evidence about what difference these make. To attempt to begin to address this, we are commissioning research to explore the impact that cookery activities can have on participants. And we want the researchers to make use of the many reports that we know might be available.
Lots of people can help with this – from those providing a few cooking activities each year within their own group or workplace to those running regular cooking courses for other groups.
What information could you send us?
We’d like copies of material you already have like evaluation reports, project proposals, lesson plans, project leaflets, annual reports and funding applications. Why? Because they can tell our researcher about:
All your information will be anonymised.
If you want more information on what to send us, please check the additional information sheet or contact Kim Please send us the material as soon as possible, the researcher may not be able to include material we get after Friday 29 August.
Please send materials to:
Community Food and Health (Scotland)
NHS Health Scotland
Meridian Court
5 Cadogan Street
Glasgow G2 6QE
Or email kim.newstead@nhs.net
Please include a note with your name and contact details. If you are planning to send information about one or more activity, please send these in separate emails or attach each batch of material together. Thank you for your support for this work.
The CFHS evaluating impact programme is open to community food organisations working in low-income communities who work with older people to eat well, or within communities to address long-term issues of food poverty.
The aim of the programme is to increase the amount of evidence on the difference made by community food initiatives (CFIs) in the areas of work indicated. To do this we are offering community food organisations the opportunity to access support to evaluate and report on their work.
There are two support opportunities available, which will suit CFIs at different levels of evaluative skill and capacity; evaluating impact development funding and the evaluating impact learning account.
More information and details of how to apply are available in the CFHS other funding and opportunities section.
Increasingly community food initiatives across Scotland are responding to demands for emergency food aid for those experiencing the most severe effects of food poverty. The provision of emergency food parcels through food banks is rapidly growing; however, balancing the need for short term emergency food aid with creating sustainable change for people experiencing food poverty is an emergent challenge across Scotland.
Community Food and Health (Scotland) or CFHS is looking to hear about your experiences of responding to the need within communities for emergency food aid. Considering the demand you are experiencing for support within communities and the type of work you are doing to respond to these needs, please share with us ‘key messages’ which you believe are important for policy makers; practitioners; and funders.
Please use this template to respond.
This learning will help inform future work of CFHS and to influence the work of other policy makers, practitioners and funders. It will enable us to highlight the contribution of community food initiatives whilst also recognising where policy and practice developments are needed.
We are offering organisations the opportunity to book a place for one of our Evaluation Learning Exchange days. Each day will have a similar format, reflecting together and sharing learning on various aspects of evaluation eg. setting outcomes, collecting information and what to do with it. The day will include activities and opportunities to network with others.
The Evaluation Learning Exchange days are:
To book a place, tell us who want to take part, where they want to attend and if appropriate provide the additional information requested.
The booking form (word 71 kb) should then be returned to Jacqui McDowell.
As many of you will be aware, Consumer Focus Scotland is being closed down as part of the UK Government’s new approach to consumer protection, which potentially left Community Food and Health (Scotland) homeless.
With the approval of the Scottish Government, who fund CFHS, as of 1 April 2013 the team becomes part of NHS Health Scotland, a Special Health Board with a national remit to reduce health inequalities. Its new corporate strategy, ‘A Fairer Healthier Scotland’, sets out the role, direction and priorities of NHS Health Scotland for the next five years.
CFHS has worked very closely with NHS Health Scotland, and its predecessor organisations, since we were established in 1996. It is currently our intention to continue with the e-bulletin and Fare Choice newsletter. All those who currently receive it will continue to do so unless we hear from you that you wish to be removed from the mailing list.
From 1 April 2013 you can contact CFHS by telephone on 0141 414 2890 and by email at
nhs.HealthScotland-CFHS@nhs.net
NHS Health Scotland have offices in both Glasgow and Edinburgh and full contact details for all team members will be circulated as soon as they are known.
CFHS has issued a new invitation to tender to produce a model of the ‘theory of change’ underpinning the work of community food initiatives involving older people in Scotland. This will lay out the rationale that informs different initiatives and provide a model that can be a useful starting point for organisations looking to describe the change they are looking to make.
The deadline for submission of proposals is 12.00 Monday 19 November.
CFHS’s revised learning and development programme is now available.
Following the success of our customer care course in Edinburgh, a second course is being held in Glasgow on 9 November.
Places are also available for the following: Understanding social enterprise, 19 October, Re-union canal boat, Edinburgh, 10 am – 4 pm (please note the revised date)
Scottish Grocers Federation’s Healthy Living Programme ‘training the trainers’, Bathgate, 10 am – 1 pm
Introduction to policy, 13 December, Glasgow, 10 am – 3 pm (please note the revised date)
Applications are also welcomed for our Royal Society for Public health Level 3 Award in nutrition for healthier food and special diets course, being held in January 2013.
Details for all of the above, and the applications forms can be found in the Current Work section
Further information on our rescheduled understanding social enterprise course, which is to be held in Edinburgh on Friday 19 October, is now available.
Full details of all our learning and development opportunities and application forms are available in the Current Work section.
Places are now available on this free support package designed to build capacity to evaluate the impact of work involving food, mental health and wellbeing.
The package will include:
Full details of the package together with a programme and application form are available in the Current Work section.
The closing date for applications is Friday 12 October 2012.
The CFHS annual networking conference will take place at the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow on Wednesday 7 November. On the right track? will bring together everyone who has a role or interest in community food and health activity that addresses health inequalities in Scotland.
Further information and details of how to book are available from the Current Work section.
Invitation to Tender: CFHS welcomes tenders to carry out research on the impact of community cookery skills activities on families. Full information is available in the current work section.
Funding offer to take part in the research around cooking skills: CFHS is also pleased to invite applications from groups and agencies working with or within the community or voluntary sector to take part in this research that we are . We are offering fixed funding of £500 per application and will fund three groups or agencies in total.
For more details, visit the CFHS other funding and opportunities section.
Our new fact sheet looks at the impact of awarding small amounts of funding for community food retailers.
The fact sheet summarises feedback from 12 of the 15 community food retailers funded by CFHS to run promotional activities in January and February this year and is available to download from the Publications Library.
The interest and need for economic evidence of your impact is becoming more prevalent. Whether developing your social enterprise or making the case for your contribution to preventative spend agendas.
In this short CFHS fact sheet we reflect on lessons from those who have already taken the journey to develop economic evidence. We reflect on the benefits and resources needed to develop it. By the end you should be able to assess your own readiness and capacity to develop economic evidence.
CFHS brought together a range of local and national agencies for a round table discussion on ‘constructive food and health policy and practice in the face of austerity’ on 31 July.
The discussion looked at how, in the face of reports of increasing food poverty, to develop policy and practice responses that are progressive and empowering rather than potentially fostering dependence.
A note of the discussion ‘Footing the bill or thinking ahead’ is now available.
You can join in the discussion at our national conference on 7 November.
CFHS’s learning and development programme [PDF, 170kb] is now available. The programme now includes details of additional courses we are running up until November.
See Current Work for the link to further information and the application forms.
CFHS is compiling a map of community retailers and would like to include as many community food co-ops, fruit and vegetable stalls and barras and community shops as we can. Our map, which can be found here, now contains over 140 community food retailers.
If your community retailing outlet is missing, and you would like it included, please contact Anne.
CFHS is looking for applications for funding from community food intiatives that want to increase access to locally grown fruit and vegetables in their communities. Groups can apply for up to £1000 to develop ideas to make this happen.
The funding programme runs until the end of March 2013, but will close once all the funding has been allocated.
For details of how to apply, please read the further information (PDF 29 kb) or contact Anne Gibson
Glasgow Community Food Initiative is currently recruiting for a Community Cook at its Springburn hub. The Community Cook will be responsible for the organisation and delivery of food based activities including pop-up cafes, community meals and community focused workshops.
Applications close on 28 April 2025.
More information and details of how to apply on the goodmoves website.
Nourish Scotland is looking for 12 people with diverse personal and professional perspectives to join co-design sessions exploring the details of public diners.
– What’s on the menu?
– How much is ‘affordable’?
– Where are the best places to open them?
To find out more, including details on how to apply, see here.
Glasgow Community Food Network, Glasgow Food Policy Partnership and the Fair Food for All Partnership are working together to support community organisations in the work they are doing to address food insecurity in communities across Glasgow, particularly in relation to cash first approaches and income maximisation. As part of this they are keen to know if provision of training and/or awareness raising sessions for community organisations would be helpful.
To better understand what your organisation would consider as relevant, appropriate support, we would be grateful if you could fill in the survey below by 30th April 2025. We are keen to get an understanding of your training needs and how these can met. We are also keen to find out if you would be interested in peer networking and support sessions for community organisations delivering food insecurity services. If there is sufficient interest, we can explore the format and frequency that would be most suitable.
This survey can be filled out on behalf of an organisation; please indicate how many staff and volunteers are in the organisation. All the training we offer will be available free of charge. This survey should take no more than 10 minutes to fill in, and all the responses will be used to get a better understanding of the types of organisations across Glasgow who are interested in training being available and the nature of the topics of interest.
You can access the survey here.
If you have any questions, please contact Faiza Hansraj-Jackson at Faiza.Hansraj-Jackson@glasgow.ac.uk, Jill Muirie at Jill.Muirie@glasgow.ac.uk or Mark Fitzpatrick at MarkF_GCFN@outlook.com.
The British Nutrition Foundation has published an article written by experienced food teacher, and British Nutrition Foundation Trustee, Rosalie Forde, exploring how to better support students with additional needs in food lessons. The article, on the Food- fact of life education site, offers practical strategies to make food lessons more accessible and enjoyable for neurodivergent students.
Nutrition Scotland has an introductory offer for communities for the RSPH Level 2 and Level 3 Awards in Nutrition and Health, both class-based (running in spring and summer this year) and as e-learning. The courses cover the key role of nutrition in health and wellbeing.
Eat Well Age Well offers two E-learning courses, Carers E-Learning and General E-Learning. Both courses are based on its Raising the Issue of Malnutrition Training and utilise videos that were developed in partnership with NHS Tayside and Dundee Health and Social Care Partnership.
The Scottish Building Society Foundation aims to invest in the long-term future of communities in Scotland and is looking to provide financial support to charities and community groups.
Apply by 7 April 2025.
Beginning in mid-March Nourish Scotland is taking its Public Diners Exhibition to different galleries, libraries, halls across Scotland and hosting a series of suppers alongside this roadshow.
More information on the Nourish website.
Join the ALLIANCE for a discussion with Dr. David Walsh and Professor Gerry McCartney as they share the evidence behind the decline in life expectancy and austerity policies.
3 April 2025
10.30 am – 12 pm
Online
Join Nourish for this in-person event to share what has been learned about monitoring the right to food for households belonging to this major food culture in Scotland.
2 April 2025
5.30 pm – 8 pm
Strathclyde Students Union, Glasgow
More information and registration on the eventbrite website.
Showcasing the importance of the community food sector
Join us as we highlight how community food initiatives build local partnerships to collectively make a difference.
In this webinar, Community Food Initiatives North East (CFINE) and Lanarkshire Community Food and Health Partnership (LCFHP) will discuss how their work makes a difference to their local communities by improving access to affordable, sustainable and nutritious food, tackling poverty and building resilience.
Thursday 29 May 2025
11 am – 12 pm
Online via Teams
They’ll share tips and ideas on how they’ve established links with local partnerships, local food systems and other networks. There will be time for questions and discussion.
This is the first in our series of online sessions that aims to bring people together to collectively build a stronger community food sector in Scotland. If you are planning to get involved in shaping future Good Food Nation Plans or are a community food initiative who would like to learn from others, then this learning session is for you.
Register on the Eventbrite website.
Please contact Kim Newstead phs.cfhs@phs.scot if you would like to contribute to future sessions.
You can read case studies on the Public Health Scotland website about how CFINE and LCFHP contribute to addressing health inequalities.