Moving from food poverty to resilient community food security with Food Ladders

Food security is when all people can, without disproportionate struggle, utilise and locally access the food they need to live their best lives.  We can all get behind this, but what does it mean? How can we do this without further harming the planet? While I wouldn’t propose having all the answers, creating a pathway and plan to achieve this vision is an essential first step.  

At the moment, we have pockets of activity segregated by the resources that people have available to them, shaped by competing interests and power relations, and the different struggles that people face. Various scales of intervention can pull different levers to redress this imbalance and inequality.  At the national scale we can mandate minimum wage thresholds to ensure that work pays enough to live and create safety nets that support people and places to help lift them out of disadvantage. We can introduce policies that reduce barriers, build infrastructures and open up spaces for engagement with healthy and sustainable food production and consumption.     

The local scale, however, is where people interact with or are excluded from their local food system.  A local food system includes what food is available to a community as well as how it is accessed (e.g., purchased, self-grown, given, shared) and the conditions within which it is produced or made available (e.g., wages and working conditions, environmental concerns, ownership, rights, motivations). To achieve food security, we must also consider the everyday experiences, practices and contexts of those who eat food alongside food production and distribution.  The food ladders framework works directly within this space to connect people and activity, to provide a place to rest and recover, build capabilities and capacity, and open opportunities for people to engage with each other and imagine new and fairer food futures.

Underpinning the food ladders framework is a social development approach, which recognises struggle as a lack of resources needed to navigate what have become inhospitable contexts.  Resources include money, but also food skills and knowledge, social connections, physical health and mental wellbeing.  These factors deteriorate for individuals as food insecurity increases.  Struggle also accumulates in places as resource depletion aggregates and shared assets are undermined. Both people and places are the focus of social development. 

The Food Ladders framework works across three rungs. Rung 1 is Catching. This is emergency activity done to/for people in crisis situations when a helping hand is needed. Rung 2 is Capacity-Building. This is supported activity, done with people, to help build skills, stability and resilience. Rung 3 is Self-Organising. This is community-led activity done by people to pursue their collective interests. The uprights supporting these rungs include community food networks, local councils, anchor institutions and other organisations that work together to link, resource and facilitate activity across the ladder’s rungs.   

Councils across the UK are now utilising the Food Ladders Framework to inform local food strategies, by trusts and foundations to inform funding decisions, and within local communities to reflect on and structure 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.  These themes are understanding, communicating, visioning, implementing, resourcing, organising, motivating, integrating. 

This toolkit will be available online and launched on 10 September 2024. If you would like to attend the launch event at a food festival hosted by the Lambeth Community Shop, please register here as places are limited.  In the meantime, you can also read more about the food ladders.