Food Ladders Toolkit

Welcome to the Food Ladders Toolkit

Moving beyond food poverty to resilient community food security

Food ladders are a way of seeing and developing everyday food security and increasing community resilience

Food Policy Councils and the Food Ladders

Ladders have both rungs and rails. Food Policy Councils act as the rails connecting the rungs together. By forming an inclusive, cross-sector food partnership, public agencies, community organisations, businesses, and academics can collaborate to create lasting change by agreeing on priorities and action for the local area. In the UK, the Sustainable Food Places brings together food partnerships, which can also be considered a food policy council (for more on this and a history of FPCs see Schiff, Levkoe and Wilkinson 2022). A food policy council (FPC) can significantly impact local communities by shaping food systems to be healthier, more equitable and more sustainable.

Food Ladder Rung	FPC Role and Impact
Rung 1: Catching	FPCs help coordinate emergency food aid (e.g., food parcels, soup kitchens), ensuring rapid crisis response and connecting people to immediate support
Rung 2: Capacity Building	FPCs support and advocate for initiatives like community gardens, food pantries, nutrition education, and voucher schemes, which build skills and resilience, enabling people to move beyond crisis
Rung 3: Self-Organising	FPCs foster community-led change by supporting local food co-ops, community-owned growing spaces, and campaigns for systemic improvements, empowering communities to shape their food system

In summary, the rails strengthen each rung of the food ladder and help communities progress from emergency food aid to resilience and empowerment, making food security more achievable and sustainable for all.

Why we need a toolkit:

People in wealthy and poor countries struggle to have the food they need to live their best lives. The reasons for this are complicated. There is a mix of individual, group, community, and national factors. The food ladders is a framework to help communities, service providers, local government, and others develop an understanding and a pathway toward a food system that meets community members’ needs and desires, both now and in the long term. We can’t expect communities that are already struggling to be able to do this on their own, but we also cannot do it without them. This toolkit aims to support those who can help to be able to do so. This toolkit is primarily aimed at those in local government, food policy councils and local food networks. There will be elements that community organisations may also find helpful. It is not a toolkit for those who are struggling.

What others say about the Food Ladders Framework:

[Food Ladders] is definitely part of the language. I would go as far as to say that without that conversation around Food Ladders, we wouldn’t have had The Bread and Butter Thing. They wouldn’t be part of what we’re currently doing. (NB: In this local authority, TBBT collaborate in 10 localities serving 6341 members by providing rung 2 support in their communities) –Local Authority, Yorkshire

[We had] diverse models [of support] in place already. We’ve now got a label for it, but we’ve always been talking about, you know, how we move people away from crisis and up the ladder without actually saying up the ladder. We had to do a huge bit of work to almost build the food ladders up within [our area] so we could actually kind of indirectly implement that model. I think when we first started, we had two community fridges and off the top of my head, now we’ve got eight. We’ve definitely got more food banks. And the cookery courses and allotment stuff that we’ve been doing has massively increased…The Food Ladders gives a framework that allows a narrative to be shared with people. –Local Authority, South East

Food Ladders was something I probably heard early on. It was how we talked about our strategy and planning. And we hear others using the term when we liaise with other boroughs doing some similar things. It’s definitely echoed in Sustain and in the Sustainable Food Places. So it seems very familiar now. It’s just how people in the food partnership space [talk]; we’re all sort of saying the same things about creating sustainable, lasting change having an impact. It’s not about crisis food provision. It’s about empowering people and giving them the sort of the tools and ability to create their own food systems and meet their own sort of needs locally. –Local Authority and Food Partnership, London Area