Nottingham City Sustainable Food Partnership (NCSFP)

What we do

The Nottingham City Sustainable Food Partnership launched in September 2024.

Food Insecurity and Financial Resilience

In our first 18 months, we have focussed on household food insecurity and financial resilience. Our activities include:

• supporting food banks and pantries through a working group and an emerging network of community hubs;
• planning the expansion of the social supermarket network through the opening of new shops and a mobile unit;
• coordinating a data-led response to help us inform the city’s ‘more-than-food’ response to food insecurity; ;
• undertaking feasibility study to develop an East Midlands Community Food Asset Map for local food emergency preparedness and resilience planning.

Healthy Food for All

The partnership’s members have been leading and working together to advance healthy food for the city’s residents, including:

• Nottingham City Council is is committed to promoting and delivering community-led growing, cooking and healthy eating activities across Nottingham. In schools, it is implementing the opt-out model for FSM and running campaigns to encourage children to eat veg and beans.
• the Council, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Growing Network have led on the co-production of a Seed-to-Fork Education Guide for primary schools, designed to help embed growing, cooking, eating and sustainability across teaching, the school environment and the wider community.
• University of Nottingham is launching an exciting social eating pilot, DISHED, co-designed with residents to create a community-led public restaurant that integrates affordable, sustainable and healthy food provision.

Procurement and the Sustainable Food Economy

Our procurement working group includes representatives from Fareshare, University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham City Council. Our objectives are to:

• support the procurement of local, sustainable food by anchor institutions;
• establish a more sustainable local food economy by identifying and supporting routes-to-market for growers/producers;
• identify how institutions/corporates can support community food relief projects through buying, storage and logistics.

Growing

The partnership includes the Nottingham Growing Network, which is a collection of growers and community gardens that span the city and county. We are looking forward to working with the network and the Council to develop a growing strategy, together with our friends at the Notts Food Network.