Tackling food insecurity together

One of our aims in our Gateshead Food Charter is: “We want Gateshead to be a place where everyone has access to healthy, nutritious and affordable food, moving from reliance on food aid to food justice and resilience.”

How will this happen?

We have found Food Ladders a useful framework. Please watch this video for a description:

1. Catching: Crisis, emergency response. This might include access to social services, advice services, emergency food aid, vouchers or cash to help people out of a crisis.
2. Capacity building to enable change: People not currently in crisis but who might be struggling to afford and access good food. Might include things like shared cooking and eating activities, food pantries, holiday clubs, community cafés, food growing projects. People and communities become more resilient by finding places of belonging, new skills, and a community to go to for help.
3. Self-organised community change: Self-organised projects that capitalise on what is good in communities. Resilient communities looking out for each other. Examples include developing a social enterprise based on community cooking to provide volunteering and employment, cooperative food growing and food procurement that increases the local availability of good food. 
   

As the video explains, no rung is more important than any of the others, a ladder only works if all the rungs are there.



People often use multiple rungs at the same time, and move up and down the ladder depending on their circumstances.

All the rungs need to be connected to each other, and we do a lot of this already. For example, through:

• events, like those the Food Partnership hold, communications, and collaborative strategy-building

• collaboration between organisations 

• sharing resources and information, e.g. a WhatsApp group to share surplus food between organisations

• signposting and referral processes

• community anchor organisations. 

Alongside the Food Ladder, there are other important ways of reducing insecurity.

For example:

• Ensuring a financial safety net by making sure all who are eligible for financial support are getting what they are entitled to

• Working with businesses and transport strategies to make it easier to access shops with a wide range of options and affordable prices

• Working with the NHS and schools to help access to nutritious food: e.g. Healthy Start Vouchers, vouchers to buy fresh fruit and vegetables

These are just a few examples of what might be included in a new Financial Wellbeing strategy and a Good Food Gateshead action plan - both being developed this year. If you would like to hear more about these or would like to be involved with their development in any way, please get in touch.

The Food Ladder in Gateshead
There are at least 30 groups across Gateshead who provide free and affordable food to their communities. We identified around 15 projects who are on rung 1, ‘catching’, and around 15 projects on rung 2.

There is lots of collaborative working, sharing of resources and support in Gateshead, and we’d like to understand what more could be done to strengthen all the rungs on the ladder, especially rung three, which can sometimes feel like the trickiest rung to build. Please get in touch if you would like to be involved in a working group to help develop our food ladder approach in Gateshead. 

Beyond Food Banks

“We’re here for emergency help, but we ultimately want to empower people to have the money in their pockets and the capabilities to access food… It’s about how we can support people to not to have to come back to the food bank, ultimately.” Lesleyann, Gateshead Foodbank, in this video about their services. 

As a Food Partnership, we want to help find ways to prevent emergency needs arising and bring about more sustainable solutions to food provision. We want to find and encourage models which give larger choice, more dignity, and a more sustainable, less emergency response which encourages longer-term community resilience. Some examples of alternative food provision include:

Food Clubs and Social Supermarkets that use a membership model

Alive Church Gateshead

St Chad’s Community Project

Communal eating spaces which also include cooking together 

Embells Community Lunch

REfUSE Pay As You Feel Café and pantry

Handcrafted The Shakey café

Vouchers 

Primary schools giving out vouchers during school holidays and to families they know are struggling.

Peace of Mind gives out supermarket vouchers to refugee and asylum-seeking families in need of basic toiletries as well as culturally appropriate food.

A whole food system approach

We recognise that food insecurity cannot be tackled in isolation: interventions need to be included and overlapped to address poverty, for example around health inequalities, education, employment, housing, and transport.

Gateshead’s Good Food Strategy will look at a whole food system which includes all these things. See our website for more information.