The Social Enterprise and Sustainable Food Systems project worked to understand the role that social enterprises can play in developing sustainable food systems. Shared Assets work in the project culminated in a Good Practice Guide to support social enterprises considering how best to enhance and grow their activities and beneficial impacts, particularly around food.
For this two year project, we worked alongside Surrey, Middlesex, and Glasgow Caledonian Universities and six social enterprises from England, Wales, and Scotland, where food plays a role in their work. Shared Assets played an intermediary role by working as a practitioner partner offer thoughts on conducting some parts of the research, and supporting on designing meetings. The six social enterprises worked as active partners by recruiting a community researcher within the enterprise who organised interviews with key stakeholders, focus groups with users of the enterprises' services or activities, and people who were less engaged in their work. The research sought to develop a holistic understanding of what 'sustainable and healthy food' meant to these communities.
Good Practice Guide
The insights and good practice in the guide come from a range of social enterprises who we held workshops with, including the six social enterprises working in areas such as community transport to early education, with additions from Shared Assets and academic partners. The guide outlines ideas for ways to scale based on good practice that has emerged through the SEFS project, and contains some questions to help think through tensions that can come through this work.
The guide includes tips for:
- Starting out
- Setting up
- Building partnerships
- Scaling
- Caring for yourself and others
Examples of these tips include:
Start small and do one thing well—then gradually build up whilst prioritising maintaining a connection to the community you initially set out to support—don’t try and do too much at the same time
Ideas belong to everybody and are already there in communities, they often just need to be channelled
Undertaking research with academics and communities
Over the course of this project, we reflected on and furthered our understanding of transdisciplinary research when working across partnerships with university academics, community researchers within social enterprises, and ourselves as practice-based researchers. Our Research Coordinator contributed a blog post to the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity reflecting on the challenges and benefits experienced by social enterprises when working with academics.
For projects to be truly transdisciplinary the imbalance in resources between academic institutions and social enterprises needs to be addressed by funders. Social enterprises need to have the time and ample funding to work on proposals structured around their needs and those of their users. At present this remains difficult when funding bodies don’t pay for proposal development time and prioritise academic outputs.
Read the full blog post here.