Food Ladders Toolkit Launch

In the UK today, as many as one in four adults struggle to access and use the food they need to live a healthy life, with some communities disproportionately bearing the brunt of this struggle.  The situation is worse now than it was during the pandemic. The rates are particularly high among those who earn less than £32k per year, have children, and live in areas of high deprivation. Work is no longer a guaranteed course of prevention, as recent figures from the FSA demonstrate. Various scales of intervention can pull different levers to redress this imbalance and inequality.  

There are things we can do at the national scale to reduce this burden, but the local scale is where people interact with or are excluded from their food system. The food ladders framework works directly within this space to connect people and activity, provide a place to rest and recover, build capabilities and capacity, and open opportunities for people to engage with each other and imagine new food futures.

The Food Ladders Framework is now being used across the UK: By Councils to inform local food strategies, by trusts and foundations to inform funding decisions, and within local communities to reflect on and structure local activity.  

The Placing Food Ladders team has consulted with more than twenty local authorities as well as food providers, funders, and researchers working in this space. Based on these conversations, we identified barriers to and opportunities for implementation and identified eight key themes we are creating and assembling tools to support. 

In addition to learning more about these themes and the toolkit at the launch event, there will be opportunities to learn from and talk to others working with and utilising the Food Ladders framework. The launch event will be a food festival hosted by Lambeth Community Shop. Lambeth Community Shop is a social supermarket and community hub in West Norwood, helping to build community food security. 

If you'd like to attend this event, please follow this link to register, as places are limited. Having said this, please also forward this invitation to others in your organisation or network whom you think might find attending worthwhile.   You can also read more about the food ladders and watch our new animation explaining the framework (https://linktr.ee/foodladders).