Guest blog: Three years of the Alliance for Dignified Food Support

Lewes District Food Partnership would like to introduce our Project Support Officer, Jay, who has been working across several projects including the Alliance for Dignified Food Support. Below, they take us on a journey from past to present as the Alliance continues to grow.

 

It’s been a hugely exciting year for the Alliance for Dignified Food Support and our members. From launching our Dignity Toolkit, to expanding our network to 145 projects and counting, and now to beginning our very first Dignity Evaluation in our home Lewes District, 2024 has been a year of strides from our beginnings as a kernel of an idea back in 2022.

Back to the start

Let’s turn back the clock to three years ago, amidst the energy and excitement of the 2022 Lewes District Food Summit, where two panel discussions became an unexpected springboard for the organisation we’ve come to be today. It all started from talks by both Carl Walker and his work on Hunger Trauma and Ronald Ranta on the concept of community supermarkets as an alternative to food banks.

Attendees were struck by the potential impact a community food offering that is built around the concept of dignity could have on those who both use it and run it. From these forums held at the Food Summit and from calls to action by local groups and projects in our Emergency Food Network and beyond, Lewes District Food Partnership tasked ourselves with putting this idea into action.

Over the following year, the project gained momentum as Jane Perry, author of Emergency Use Only and co-founder of Fitzjohns community food project in Lewes, joined the team. Drawing on the insights of individuals with first-hand experience of food insecurity, as well as input from volunteers and project coordinators, the initiative began to take shape.

Jane Perry is an experienced social researcher based in Sussex, with extensive expertise of research directly involving those with lived experience of poverty.

As well as the insightful work of Carl, Ron and Jane, the ADFS is also indebted to, and builds on, the work of Nourish Scotland Dignity In Practice Project, a pioneering project that has laid the foundation for our understanding of dignity in practise.

Growing our learning

In 2022 and 2023 we hosted a series of workshops at Kingston University with a range of community food support providers, funded by the British Academy, focused on the issue of dignity. These workshops were crucial in identifying the wide variety of ways food support can take shape, the unique challenges they face, and how the dignified food support movement must take heed of these insights and use them to our strength. 

By late 2023, the project had garnered national attention, attracting the support of national stakeholders. This led to a further series of roundtable meetings and one to one consultations with a range of stakeholders including the Independent Food Aid Network, Trussell Trust and Brighton and Hove Food Partnership. These conversations ultimately led to the formation of the Alliance for Dignified Food Support, with prominent organisations such as Feeding Britain, Church Action on Poverty, Your Local Pantry, and Sustain joining forces to raise awareness of the complex issues of indignity and trauma within community food settings.

Building a network and sharing our recommendations 

Through our ongoing consultation and evidence-based research, we developed a set of Principles and Recommendations designed to promote good practice in community food support. These recommendations offer a flexible framework for organisations to adopt, adapt, and evaluate according to their unique circumstances and community strengths and needs.

While the principles and recommendations are a useful guide, they aren’t sufficient alone to generate an in-depth examination of practices. To address this, in 2024 we were pleased to develop and launch our Dignity Toolkit, a document that sets out what, why and how the core principles and recommendations can be applied in a specific setting.

We also believe in the power of partnership and have been working to grow our network of community organisations, food partnerships, local authorities, academics and activists. With the support of national stakeholders we have been able to reach out to new connections and via our online ‘Work with us’ form we have received expressions of interest from over 140 parties, who have been given access to the Toolkit. Take a look below at our (still growing!) network map.

The team also spoke at local statutory meetings and academic workshops, sharing both our vision and creating space to learn from other organisations up and down the country.  We hosted several webinars for national organisations such as Feeding Britain and the Independent Food Aid Network, as well as for local networks in Hastings, Hull and Adur & Worthing.

Launching a Dignity Evaluation pilot

We have been working hard on our pilot Dignity Evaluation project with local project Malling Food Bank situated in Lewes which has been gratefully funded through the Household Support Fund via Lewes District Food Partnership.

King’s Church in Lewes is host to Malling Food Bank, where the Alliance for Dignified Food Support has launched the first Dignity Evaluation pilot

Our team have been working closely with coordinator Anna Scott and her fantastic team of volunteers on the first phase of the project, developing a questionnaire and canvassing both volunteers and members to create a baseline measurement using our existing Principles and Recommendations. Already, so many interesting questions and observations are already coming to the fore – such as how will members answers change from the beginning to the end of the evaluation if they had not considered factors like dignity, choice and access before? We hope to learn more as the evaluation progresses to inform both the work at Malling Food Bank and our own.

We will soon be moving forward with our next phase very soon, conducting interviews with members to learn more about their experiences around accessing the project. The evaluation process will include an in-depth analysis of successes, challenges, and areas for improvement. By the end, the Alliance team will provide a detailed report that summarises the findings, highlighting key achievements and tailored recommendations for further development and growth.

Next steps for the new year

The coming year we are excited to continue the growth of our network and bring more projects, knowledge and experience to the table. We have now finalised our full list of training opportunities on our website, which range from a short, no-cost introductory webinar to a comprehensive evaluation of dignity in practice at your organisation.

We are continuing to seek out opportunities for funding, collaboration and learning as our work progresses. If you would like to talk about how we can work together, please contact us at dignity@sussexcommunity.org.uk.

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