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In the UK we are a nation of shop keepers. Proud, industrious people, making a living, giving back to the community and making the local high street vibrant. Incredible Edible Reading believes in business and its positive impact in our communities.
Making connections between the various initiatives around the town and bringing everyone together to imagine a fully-fledged and sustainable Incredible Edible Reading are our current goals.
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If you're growing your own food or want to share ideas and aspirations for how businesses can craete a town connected by good food, we're keen to hear from you!
Incredible Edible Reading supports policy interventions that bring to life the right to grow and ignite opportunities for community food-growing initiatives to flourish
Community-led Policy Innovation with the Open University
Over the past few years, Reading community food-growing initiatives have been active participants in a number of action research projects in collaboration with the Open University and others. We’re spotlighting a project that has been instrumental in bringing together participants from food-growing initiatives across the country, including Dave Richards (Food4Families), and focusing on how initiatives like Incredible Edible Reading can make a difference to policy makers at the local, regional and national level.
Community-led Policy Innovation for Local Food-Growing, led by colleagues at the Open University and designed around the interventions made between research institutions and community groups, involves partners in Southwark, Lambeth, Runneymede and Spelthorne, as well as here in Reading. Using Participatory Action Research methods to evaluate attempts to influence policy makers, the current project emerges from an earlier collaboration exploring how local food-growing initiatives responded to the Covid-19 crisis using digital storytelling methods. Key findings from that project continue to inspire further policy innovations, especially around the following how community food growing benefits all by:
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💚 Providing a crucial collective approach to rebuilding the future differently
💚 Adapting to disruption through creative responses to current challenges
💚 Building community bonds, friendships and support networks
💚 Promoting better ways for our society to organise and feed itself
💚 Strengthening the capacities, skills, enthusiasms for creating better health and wellbeing
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Embracing digital storytelling empowered participants to capture how community gardens enabled them to survive the pandemic. It’s that empowering and incredible focus on the benefits of community food-growing initiatives to enhance well-being and build community for better futures that we want to reiterate here. And encourage you to dive into the resources emerging from these potent policy interventions emerging from our collective community food-growing endeavours.
This is incredibly significant as we campaign for Right to Grow to be adopted in Reading - cutting down bureaucracy to allow community food-growing to flourish through access to land for all to grow. 🥕🥕
To find out more about how Reading has been contributing to the evidence needed to effect policy change, check out our resources below. And let us know if you have examples we can include as we make the case for policy change in the town. 🌱
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Play all of the videos from the digital storytelling project via the Cobra Collective Vimeo site.
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Download the handbook produced from that project - it is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about growing together.
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And follow the OU’s Open Societal Challenges Online Platform for more details about the incredible partnerships between higher education and the public being championed by the programme.