Over the course of an 18 month action learning project, we were funded by Friends Provident Foundation to explore the ways in which community food growing contributes to local economic resilience. We worked with three leading community food enterprises: Ecological Land Cooperative, OrganicLea and The Kindling Trust, to understand how food growing supports local economic development and the challenges they face creating sustainable businesses and livelihoods.

Shared Assets facilitated peer learning, site visits and semi structured interviews to explore the development of resilient local economies and their relationships with local authorities in securing access to land.

Through extensive research, we produced a series of guides for community enterprises and for local authorities who work with them:

1. Guides for community food enterprises- to help enterprises strengthen and evidence their contribution to the development of strong and resilient organisations, livelihoods, networks and local economies.
2. Guides for Local Authorities- in order to guide authorities as they support community food enterprises to help growing sites to develop sustainably, make connections with others in the public and private sectors, and to access land and growing spaces.

Shared Assets focused on the support of local economic resilience through the development of this project, the definition of which is based on that proposed by the New Economic Foundation (Greenham, T., Cox, E. and RyanCollins, J. (2013) Mapping economic resilience, New Economics Foundation and Friends Provident Foundation). To be resilient, local economies need a broad range of assets, skills and innovations that serve and respond to the needs of local people and the environment. They also require strong relationships between local people, responsive institutions and a strong sense of local ownership and stewardship of the resources, goods and services which people use.

Through the creation of these guides, the project has successfully provided informative infrastructure that allows both community food enterprises and local authorities to work together to create resilient food systems. Shared Assets was able to bring experience in complex research methods, as well as the ability to work with both a range of community enterprise sizes and with local authorities.