I recently stepped away from the Farm for a few days to attend a knowledge sharing event with other local food projects that are funded by Big Lottery.
We were hosted by Commonwork, an organic dairy farm, conference and study centre situated in the Kent countryside, south west of Sevenoaks. It’s a beautiful farm that are trying to demonstrate how organic farming can be both commercially viable and sustainable. The staff there have developed a fantastic kitchen garden, designed to engage children in growing. We certainly can learn from their experience here. They had an interesting coloured flag system to teach children about the crop rotations, as well as great posters to teach growing principles.
During the visit, we spent a lot of time discussing common themes between our projects. For example, what sustainability really means for our projects, strategies for project dissemination and replication, understanding social return on investment and the role of local food in the public health agenda. Big, gripping issues!
I was particularly excited to meet representatives from the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership and Incredible Edible Todmorden – both inspiring projects that also have grand visions for food growing in their communities. These projects really inspired me to work on re-igniting the Sutton-wide One Planet Food programme, of which the Farm was a component. However tempting this is, the Farm is the focus right now – we really want this to work.
It can be easy to loose perspective when you’re engrossed in your own project. Finding space to look around and see how other communities are engaging people with food growing is important. Although our local contexts were all very different, we still have so much we can learn from each other.
The knowledge sharing is not just useful, it’s comforting. To be able to get together and share experiences gave a sense of solidarity in our projects and their aims. It’s clear that our projects are not just about food – they are all demonstrating that the activity of food growing provides value beyond the food itself, including employment, exercise, building social cohesion, reducing our footprints, promoting environmental restoration and increasing biodiversity. That’s really exciting.
Making our projects financial viable and sustainable for the long-run is challenging. We learnt how each project had it’s own measures of success, and it was useful to acknowledge these differences and suport each other in clarifying them. I left feeling Sutton Community Farm really is a unique community project – with a strong, inspiring vision – and that we are moving in a positive direction.
Written by Sam Smith, Managing director of Sutton Community Farm