Tools in this section focus on different considerations for planning how you will implement the Food Ladders. Tools included are linked to seven areas.
- Planning to make your network and its actions sustainable
- Planning for Risks and Opportunities
- Agreeing on framing to overcome misunderstanding and miscommunication
- Planning your values and how you will incorporate them
- Planning how to implement your strategy
- Planning for how you will allocate resources
- Plan for how you will manage change
Planning to make your network and its actions sustainable
Going forward, one of the first questions will be organising activity to maintain its momentum and achieve its aims. While all coordination should be partnership working, who takes the lead may differ depending on circumstances within a particular locality. Sustainable Food Places identified three types of local food networks: Those housed within the public sector, those housed within a third-sector organisation, and those fully independent. There will also be decisions to be made about the legal status of your network.
Tool 1: Food Partnership Structures This report, with case studies, illustrates the different approaches.
Tool 2: Organisational structures and legal status. This document is the first point of reference for understanding the different forms of legal status your food network might take. It should be followed up with professional advice.
Planning for Risks and Opportunities
A SWOT analysis can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses you have within your network as well as enable you to be able to plan for opportunities as they arise and anticipate threats.
Tool 3: SWOT Analysis
Agreeing on framing to overcome misunderstanding and miscommunication
Work together to agree on a common language that everyone will commit to and use in every communication. Planning what language you will use and how it relates to the collective vision will increase the likelihood that it will be achieved. See the materials on framing in this toolkit for further explanation. It will be useful to dedicate a good proportion of one of your meetings to agreeing on the language used.
Planning your values and how you will incorporate them
Each rung of the ladder has different domains. The domains we identified include Food, Social, Economic, Health, and Environment. In your food ladders you may include other domains. Furthermore, how you plan for building the food ladders will involve having discussions about and planning for how you will set about prioritising different forms of value into your processes.
For many activities, your local partners will be able to provide the things you need to develop the ladders across each domain. But this is not always the case. Sometimes you will need to engage partners who are not within your network or who are not already embedded in your local place to deliver on the plans you have made because they can help you achieve them sooner. Considering in advance what your principles are for engaging these partners and asking how they help you achieve your vision will ensure that the misallocation of resources is minimised.
- Food: This domain concerns we think about the value of food and what food is. Food takes on different values as it is incorporated into what people are doing. It can be fuel for energy, nutrients and calories for health, or a means for financial wellbeing. Food also expresses care and love and can signal celebration. Not everyone thinks about food in the same way nor does everyone have a good relationship with food. How we think about and know food and the relationships we have with it are central to improving the food systems within which we live our everyday lives. Planning each of these dimensions of food and anticipating how they connect to different forms of value should inform decision-making.
- Social: This is about improving the well-being of individuals and communities, encouraging interconnectedness and mutual support among people. Recognising the social value of a space or activity and weighing this value against other forms of value can help you make decisions that help you create the food system that is in your area’s vision.
- Economic: this focuses on ensuring that you get good value for the money spent. But not all value is about spending the least or going with the recognised or most experienced partners. There are many approaches and business models, that depending on their configuration can mean money is recirculated back into local economies in the form of jobs and local investment. When planning for engaging with partners, it is worthwhile asking what your limits are concerning their commitment to the local economy, how they will engage with local procurement, and how they will ensure local employment opportunities with wages that are sufficient and that develop people.
- Environment: this stresses the importance of sustainable processes that take care of both the social and physical environment, ensuring a viable future for everyone.
- Health: Ensuring people can live their best life for as long as possible cannot be left to the health system alone. Food is a key component of this, but it is not just about the nutritional quality of food. It also includes mobilising the commensal qualities of food to ensure people have the relationships, confidence, and well-being needed to thrive.
Tool 4: The Crown Commercial Services provides more information on Public Sector Procurement that discusses these principles.
Tool 5: The Food Farming and Countryside Commission has further information about using public finance to support local growth in the food sector.
Tool 6: Social Value 101 The Social Value Portal has a range of resources and case studies that demonstrate the value of thinking locally and how social and financial value can be derived and measured. Their guides are written for business, but can be repurposed for your organisation.
Tool 7: The Health Foundation has a guide with case studies for Implementing Health in all policies.
Tool 8: Case Study: Bordeaux Food Policy and Food Policy Council
The City of Bordeaux has been on a journey to create a food system transformation that brings everyone to the table. Key aspects of this policy include embedding food policy in social services, using growing space for food even when it is not farmland, improving supply chains for local partners, and crossing municipal borders to create new food alliances to meet the food needs of the city.
Make a strategy that incorporates all the dimensions of your vision and then make a plan for following it through.
Planning how to implement your strategy
There are man examples of food strategies from other places in the UK that have engaged with the principles of the food ladders framework. All have had extensive public engagement to inform the aims and vision.
- Bradford Food Strategy
- Leeds food Strategy
- Sheffield Food Strategy and Sheffield Food Strategy Action Plan
- Birmingham Food System Strategy
You can see by reading the strategies that some have incorporated clear and measurable objectives within their plans, while others have set out the overall strategy and are working toward implementation plans. Whether you develop your strategy and the implementation at the same time, or take this in stages will depend on the resources you have and how you want to approach the tasks involved and the timescales you foresee for each.
Developing a theory of change for your strategy can be a good way to approach identifying how you will know if you have achieved your aims at each point along the way as well as provide you with oversite as to how to sequence activities and where barriers and resource limitations may be encountered.
Tool 9: The Centre for Theory of Change has excellent resources, including case studies, software and templates for creating a theory of change on their website. We suggest you start here to learn more about it. Doing this work can be difficult to do internally, however. Several organisations can provide external support for creating your theory of change.
Planning for how you will allocate resources
While everyone may agree with the vision, experience shows that in the thick of it, the vision gets lost in response to immediate crisis needs or existing ways of doing things. Many local authorities are critical funders of community food organisations in their own right. Several councils we spoke to administered funds through grants to community organisations, using national programmes such as the Household Support Fund (HSF) to support their work.
Many councils also use the Fund beyond emergency support, including working with local charities and community groups to provide residents with key appliances, school uniforms, cookery classes, and items to improve energy efficiency in the home.
UK Government, Household Support Fund
A key to implementing the Food Ladders is to make a clear plan for allocating resources across the ladder. This will avoid arguments later. Following the principles of Community-Centric Fundraising will reduce competition between applicants, prioritise the collective needs of a local area over the missions of individual organisations, and increase social justice. Based in the US, Community-Centric Fundraising is a movement to evolve how fundraising is done in the nonprofit sector. Its goal is to support fundraisers and other nonprofit professionals in re-examining every fundraising philosophy and practice they have been taught, engaging in vigorous ongoing conversations, and exploring fundraising in ways that reduce harm and further social justice.
Case Study: North Tyneside Council
North Tyneside Council has a Poverty Intervention Fund (PIF), first introduced as part of the council’s budget in 2020. The fund’s original aim was to address poverty in the area from an economic, social and health perspective (North Tyneside Council, 2020). In 2023, the council’s Social Inclusion team allocated £64,000 from that year’s PIF budget towards a community Food Grant, prompted by a priority on tackling food insecurity in the area’s Food Strategy. The aim of the grant was to develop capacity-building activities in North Tyneside
‘I just think [Food Ladders] has been really useful, particularly where the grant is concerned because I suppose for anyone applying for the grant, [they can] see that “what we’re doing is out of scope for this. So we either need to not make an application or we need to change how we do things”’ –
Social Inclusion Manager, North Tyneside Council.
Using Food Ladders as a framework, the team designed the grant criteria in such a way that prioritised applications seeking funds for ‘more than food’ (fig. 1). Rather than simply allocating funds towards the provision of Rung 1 emergency food support, the Food Grant was designed to support the development of more supported, capacity-building, Rung 2, activity. This included the creation of new types of provision (social supermarkets and food hubs), and the creation or development of partnerships, to encourage collaborative working.
Since launching the grant, the council has seen a positive response from applicants. Initial hesitation from some applicants, ‘especially those that have only provided crisis support in the past’, was mitigated by council officers spending time with organisations, ‘explaining how the model works and the benefits, as well as making sure there is clear signposting for residents facing crisis’. As a result of the grant, the council has funded the creation of 6 new social supermarkets, and supported 3 existing social supermarkets through a voucher referral scheme. 2 of the 6 new projects are schools, and the other 4 are VCS organisations.
‘The feedback so far has been very positive. We recently had a meeting of our food partnership, and those organisations who were initially hesitant spoke positively about the impacts [of more Rung 2 provision] and the reception from their community.’ One project that received the Food Grant reported: ‘I am happy to say we have had really good feedback. A number of families have told us they have been able to buy fresh produce that would usually be too expensive. We have helped a young person with mental health issues who now enjoys coming to do shopping”.’
Social Inclusion Officer, North Tyneside
By focussing on capacity-building activity, the grant aims to create longer-term interventions. Much funding for community food provision over recent years has been short-term emergency support, for example, for stocking food banks with food or providing one-off vouchers to residents. Such funds require frequent renewal to sustain benefits to recipient communities. By targeting investment in capacity-building activities, longer-term impact can be achieved. Geography also matters. North Tyneside Council also did the mapping work to identify where gaps in provision existed and strategically targeted these areas.
Plan for how you will manage change
While transitioning can be exciting to some, for others it can be scary and uncertain. The three horizons model in the Visioning tools helps you think about how you envision a new future, but to accept the new idea people will also need to accept that old ways of doing things will end. For some of your stakeholders, this may mean ending something that they have committed to over several years. It will create in them a sense of uncertainty, loss and maybe even anger.
Tool 10: The Bridges Transition Model focuses on workplace change, but its principles apply to transitioning communities as well. Within the model three stages are identified: 1. Ending, losing, and letting go; 2. The neutral zone; and 3. The new beginning.
Tool 11: Mind Tools offers written guidance for managing this change at each stage with links to further tools.
You will want to factor these stages of transition into how the network functions as it moves forward and make time to manage the emotional responses that people in your network will inevitably feel. It may be worth considering how this work will fit within any new coordinator roles that arise from creating a food network and budgeting for them.
GeoFoodie 