Working with Belfast City Council, we established and joined the Sustainable Food Places Partnership in Belfast.
About the partnership
Sustainable Food Places is a partnership programme led by the Soil Association, Food Matters and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. The Sustainable Places Network brings together pioneering food partnerships across the UK. Through the power of partnerships, the programme aims to make healthy and sustainable food a defining characteristic of where people live.
Our role
We led on a contract for Belfast City Council in 2022, providing a framework and action plan for a Sustainable Food Place Partnership in the area.
Our research team was led by Miriam Turley, Policy & Research Officer, Social Farms & Gardens and included Patricia Wallace, NI Manager, Social Farms & Gardens, Beth Bell, Food Ethics Consultant and Dr Sinéad Furey, a food poverty expert at Ulster University. The report mapped sustainable food activity in the area, and made recommendations for the structure of a Sustainable Food Places partnership to coordinate this activity across the city. We interviewed over 40 contributors, and gathered information via surveys and desktop research. You can read the summary here - link and research and evidence here - link.
Since the publication of our report, Belfast Council has gone on to convene the partnership, one of four Sustainable Food Places Partnerships in Northern Ireland coordinated by charity Nourish NI. We look forward to seeing the outcomes and some of the work the partnership will achieve in the coming year.
Contact us
If you'd like to know more about our Sustainable Food Places Partnership work, please email our Northern Ireland team at [email protected]