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About Grassroots Food Network

Grassroots Food Network Ltd (GFN) is a not-for-profit organisation (limited by guarantee), working to deliver, practical solutions to revive local and regional food chains through the following means:

Identifying, evaluating and piloting practical, local food supply initiatives.
AV Documentation and good-practice dissemination.
Capacity building and sharing market information.
Encouraging the application and uptake of information technologies.

GFN’s diverse work includes trialling ethnic food crops, raising awareness of food issues in schools and public sector food procurement initiatives. Although currently set within the regional context of Yorkshire and Humberside, EU funding has enabled the sharing of ‘best practice’ across other peri-urban regions in NW Europe. A key component of GFN’s success is its ability and reputation to work ‘beyond the barrier’, whether tangible as in geographical or intangible as in ‘perceived’, but always based on addressing the current realities faced by local producers, processors and the local markets they could potentially serve.

Our aims and vision are clear and inform all our work, namely to:

Engage in dialogue with relevant authorities and funding agencies, which recognise that collaboration within the supply chain is vital to revitalise a sustainable, local food economy.
Initiate the collaborative piloting & exchange of practical, market-driven solutions to problems shared by the various food sectors & cultures, both demographic and social, for the mutual benefit of all players within in the local food economy.
Give support & advice to groups who share a common interest to develop their ideas & projects & access local, regional, national and European funding sources.
Encourage practical work with an educational focus within communities and schools, raising awareness of the issues surrounding food and to enable groups to implement new, local, food-related activities within their own communities.

GFN is continually exploring the minimum and necessary structures required to link local primary food producers with local customers/consumers, working alongside:

Producers.
Disadvantaged, inner-city Communities.
Local Wholesalers and Retailers.
Public Sector Procurement Departments.
Consumer groups.
Producer / consumer NGO’s.
Local Community Groups.
National, regional and local government agencies.

Relevant Project Experience

Local Food for Bradford Schools DEFRA/PSFPI Phase 1

www.grassroots.uk.net/opengp/becs.shtml

Funded by DEFRA’s Public Sector Food Procurement Initiative, GFN undertook a collaborative case study to identify ways to support and take forward the pioneering ECS (Education Contract Services) work on local food sourcing. Published in April 04, this widely circulated and well-received document identified:

Ways to support local food producers, processors and ECS in increasing local food sourcing
Barriers to local supplier bids for ECS & wider public sector contracts
Flexibilities in tender specifications & processes to encourage local suppliers
Ways to improve local primary producer/processor/procurer supply chains through collaboration

Local Food for Bradford Schools DEFRA/PSFPI Phase 2

Taking forward the priorities identified by phase 1 above, this project scaled up local sourcing throughout ECS’s service provision, through increasing local supply chain co-ordination/collaboration of procurement and local supply chains, and making a significant contribution to local economic regeneration. The work aimed to reconnect and regenerate urban and rural areas, open up opportunities for farmers, including smaller farmers in the urban fringe, by supplying schools in nearby conurbations whilst, at the same time, identifying cost savings to maintain current school meal prices, particularly important to schools in disadvantaged areas.

Yorkshire Forward’s Regional Supply Chains Mapping Study

Grassroots Food Network Ltd. was part of a consortium delivering a major baseline information study for Yorkshire Forward, mapping regional public procurement supply networks. The outcome of this work will direct the future activity of Yorkshire Forward, Government Office, DEFRA and other bodies in the region, both public and private sector. GFN’s contribution majored on the school, procurement sector, their meat supply chains and Co₂ emission analysis. The overall study aimed to identify a range of investments which could contribute to a ‘step-change’ increase in sustainable public/private sector regional food procurement supply.

Local Food Ð Local Plates

The Southern Upland Partnership, based in Dumfries and Galloway but also working across the Scottish Border Uplands, contracted AWC and the Grass Roots Food Network to work with the Local Authority to improve the uptake of locally sourced, red meat into the school’s service. This work has now widened to consider and recommend a range of ‘joined up’ actions to improve the entire red meat supply chain in the region culminating in a multi-sector seminar involving Ross Finnie, Scottish Minister of Environment and Rural Affairs.

INTERREG 111B Sustainable Open Space (SOSII)

www.sos-project.org

‘Sustainable Open Space - Celebrate Open Space’ started in 2003 under the ‘Protection and Creative Enhancement of the Cultural Heritage’ European Funding stream. GFN is actively involved across the South Pennines and NW Europe, promoting the concept of Sustainable Open Space, where sixteen partners from seven regions European are developing an integrated strategy to link and promote the ‘brand value’ of open space, tourism, landscape identity, local food marketing and local economic regeneration.