Landed community kitchens: Growing relationships and collaborations between social justice oriented community kitchens and local agroecological farms

The project is funded by a grant from the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) to kickstart a conversation that will lead to the codesign of a larger action-research project by people in the workshop keen to take it further.

The Project Lead is Chiara Tornaghi, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University. The Co-Leads are Maddy Longhurst, Urban Agriculture Consortium, and myself.

We aim to bring together a group of up to 30 people from local agroecological farms and social justice-oriented kitchens in urban and peri-urban places in the North of England. Participants will be broadly aligned to food sovereignty principles and interested in developing this work.

Using a participatory action research design from the onset, we will deliver impact on every step of the research process, initially focusing on building links between community kitchens and local farms in North England.

The project aims to link social justice-oriented community kitchens, which provide cooked meals and a social space, with local food growing sites that use agroecological farming practices, i.e. those that are sustainable, fair and healthy for people and the planet.

In the first stage, a network will be made between community kitchens and agroecological market gardens in the North of England. A workshop brought the first stage of the network together to progress the project with ambition in terms of scope, capacity and acquiring resources.

The hope is that this will action and inspire the movement for landed community kitchens: social food spaces that are equally accessible to all and, rather than relying on food waste or other types of food aid, source fresh, local and culturally-appropriate ingredients.

Ongoing