Geographer Megan Blake, at the University of Sheffield, has redefined food support through an innovative framework, Food Ladders. The work has driven organisational policy change helping to achieve greater reach, access to resources and influence for food charities, including the UK’s surplus food redistributor, FareShare.
Issue
One in five UK adults experience food insecurity, and food systems and the food support sector can lack cohesion and collaboration.
Approach
The research uses participatory and ethnographic techniques alongside qualitative analysis to examine the system that shape food consumption, community food support, commercial food access and surplus food redistribution.
Impact
The research has generated organisational change in the charity sector by enabling FareShare, the UK’s largest charity fighting hunger and food waste, to better understand the role of food support, redefine their key performance indictors and demonstrate their social impact to food industry partners.
The research has also influenced major producers in the food sector leading to changes in working practices, strategies and campaigns. For example, the researchers contributed to the Greencore Sustainability Report and Plan launched in 2020, which sets out a commitment to ensure 100% of surplus product is donated to communities by 2022.
Councils and regional alliances in the North of England have also been targeted with particularly high rates of poverty and more limited resources. Collaborations with local authorities and key stakeholders has led to concrete changes in how local councils (now responsible for public health services) tackle food policy. They are now addressing poverty-based food insecurity through coordinating community services to meet the needs of constituents, moving away from previous approaches reliant on individual interventions.
The research also informed the UK Voluntary and Charity Sector Emergency Planning Board’s response to COVID-19 and Brexit. The group identifies and promotes interventions including providing vouchers and hardship funds, improving food access and creating diverse foodscapes, linking communities and informing government policy. This changed Defra policy with regard to crisis food support, shifting from centralised food parcels to funding collaborative local provision.
More information
Institution: University of Sheffield
Researchers: Dr Megan Blake