Kindling's Chris & Chloe visited the Quaker's WoodBrooke Study Centre (in Birmingham) over two days for a Local Food Systems (LFS) Seminar.
There we meet up with four of the five other LFS projects being supported by the Making Local Food Work programme: Liverpool Food Alliance, Nottingham Food Partnership, Sheffield Regather Land and Colne-U-topia.
As well as networking and socialising with the other groups, we had a chance to study their projects, discuss the challenges we are all facing and share possible solutions.
For example, we found we all had a lot in common: we are all based in Northern England and we are all seeing an increase in demand for local food, coupled with a lack of growers able to produce the quantities required along with a lack of training available to create new farmers; although the potential land is available.
Tim Crabtree, of Cardiff University gave an enlightening present on 'systems thinking' and how food systems operate. E.g. the inputs into a system, like social capital, human capital, natural capital and financial capital, that fuel 'operations' which produce products and services and crucially how we can collaborate to become more efficient and increase our scale.
We were also introduced to the theories of Stafford Beer (1926 -2002) and his work on Viable Systems Models (VSM) systems which summarise and analysis an organisation's formal and informal structures.
A significant part of agenda was dedicated to the speakers giving us advice on applying Stafford Beer's theories to our own work in order to overcome challenges and structural shortcomings. This gave us an opportunity to explore the relationships within Manchester's sustainable food movement and how different elements of Kindling work interact.
We came away with a clearer understanding of our work and role and some ideas for tweaking the way we make decisions and communicate with other partners.
Thank you to the Plunkett Foundation staff for organising the event and MLFW's continued support and we look forward to continuing the discussions on the newly created web forum.