Community Resilience Project

Tasty, healthy food should be accessible to everyone.

Unfortunately a number of barriers mean this ideal is rarely met, leaving good food out of reach for many. This year we’re excited to take on these barriers as part of The Community Resilience Project in order to help people experiencing food insecurity enjoy all that Berry Farm has to offer.

The Community Resilience Project is funded by the National Lottery Community Fund and Farming Futures. It aims to create connections between producers and people to give those experiencing food insecurity access to nutritious, sustainably-produced food. Run in collaboration by the Landworkers Alliance, the Independent Food Aid Network and the Community Supported Agriculture Network, the project is supporting initiatives across the country seeking new models to improve access to good food. These pilot projects want to move beyond ‘giver’ and ‘receiver’ ideas of charity to a model based on sustainability and solidarity where everyone is treated equally and with dignity.

Here at Berry Farm, we’re going to be expanding our growing space to scale up production and generate surplus to share with local food banks and other community food organisations. We’re trialling subsidised vegetable boxes to see if this is a sustainable way to expand access while also tackling non-financial barriers to our produce, such as lack of cooking confidence, with recipe cards and demonstrations. At every step of the way we’ll be talking to local food organisations and their users to make sure these initial plans are guided by the needs and wants of the project’s intended beneficiaries. More than just providing food, we want to inspire people to enjoy our produce and give them access to skills that will continue to nourish them beyond the project’s lifetime.

By trialling and documenting our efforts and sharing experience of what does (and doesn’t) work we’ll be contributing to the wider evidence base created by the Community Resilience project. This will then be used to promote food accessibility beyond the project’s year-long lifetime, and inform policy recommendations at a local and national level and create examples for other food producers to learn from. Although our focus is local, we hope that our work will provide a replicable model that can be scaled-up in other parts of the country and thereby extend beyond our little patch of North Suffolk.

We’re thrilled to be part of the Community Resilience Project and keen to collaborate with any local organisations that share an interest in widening access to nutritious, sustainable, good food.