Becky John

Social investors are developing a pilot fund to support charities and social enterprises navigating rising energy costs by improving their energy resilience.

They need your help to make sure the solutions designed are effective and impactful. This includes understanding what you’re experiencing and what you think support should look like.

The cost-of-living crisis has enabled a ‘perfect storm’ for social enterprises, charities and community organisations, as they battle ever-increasing demand for services alongside a decline in fundraising and grants. In fact, 82% of Charity Leaders are concerned about the increased cost of utilities, including energy bills, rent and fuel.

Good Finance are committed to empowering frontline organisations – those seeing the true impact of the crisis – to have their say on the future of financial support for energy resilience and what that should look like.

The survey is open to any charity, social enterprise or community organisation and takes no longer than 7 minutes to complete. 

Results will be collated and shared directly with the social investors that are currently working to build a funding support package that really works for the sector.

Find out more here

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As part of our series exploring co-ops and community business and their links with British Food for British Food Fortnight, We spoke to Andrew Whitley, Chairman of Bread For Good CIC – better known as Scotland The Bread – who was previously a baker of 25+ years standing and saw first hand the effects of commercial bread and bread making on people and society. This article is an edited version of that broad ranging conversation.

Scotland The Bread is a collaborative project to grow better grain and bake better bread with the common purposes of nourishment, sustainability and food sovereignty.

It grew out of a Bread Matters project, where we were shifting emphasis to more community baking training, and working towards creating a community supported bakery in the Borders. We spent a long time trying to figure out what the best format was for the organisation because our mission was ultimately to try to change the food system to make it healthier for everyone involved – all the people, but also all the animals and micro-organisms affected by our current intensive chemically based agricultural system. It became clear to me that our current food system was not serving the people well. I learned that we were growing tonnes of wheat here in Scotland each year but that little of it was feeding humans – it was being turned into animal feed, or into bioethanol to feed cars – and more worryingly, large amounts was going into cheap alcohol, which of course was definitely not addressing the serious alcohol problems that some sections of Scottish society have. Big agriculture was growing wheat for profit, but it was contributing little directly to good food, or to public health.

I looked further. At the time, the Scottish Government website actually said it was not possible to grow bread making wheat in Scotland. It’s now been adjusted to say that you can’t grow the varieties that industry wants, And this is the issue. It *is* possible to grow bread making wheat here – we do and it has been done before – and the wheat we grow is more genetically diverse than modern high-yielding varieties. Mechanisation and industrial processes govern every step of the wheat growing and flour making process – the straw needs to be a uniform length for the machinery to harvest and thresh, and industrial flour mills ’standardise’ their white flour output using synthetic enzymes. Wheat is being engineered to suit the machines that process it. We should grow wheat that is nutritious and sustainable, and find better ways to harvest and work with it.

Food security, relocalising where possible, and food sovereignty are inextricably linked to our ability to meet net zero carbon emissions. We launched our first three flours in 2017, milled from varieties that were common in Scotland in the 19th century. They are, on average, more nutrient-dense than most commercial alternatives. Commercial non-wholemeal flours have four mandatory fortificants added, and commercially made bread has a whole load of other stuff added including ‘vital wheat gluten’ (labelled as the innocuous-sounding ‘wheat protein’) whose purpose is to strengthen the flour to make it easier to machine it and to prolong shelf-life. These automated processes and machines require total consistency of raw materials 365 days a year, unlike bakers who can adapt to the variability of what starts out as a product of nature.

Relationships of trust between producer and citizen have been so damaged by industrial agriculture and food processing. Only when these begin to be restored can we hope to get an honest offer to people on low incomes. Let’s put the 200 year old idea that people with little money have to eat the worst quality food behind us. A lot of the food products that are sold – marketed – to people today are nutritionally poor and their marketing disingenuous. We pay twice, at the check-out and again through the resulting personal ill health and the destruction of our environment. Food security is not just about local production for local people – it’s the essential joining up of all the elements required to address the three great crises of our times – climate breakdown, diet-related ill-health, and the crisis of nature. We don’t need to ban international trade but we are importing things that we could perfectly easily grow. Why? We could have a long conversation here about market forces and economics but we can simply say that while we have an economic system that rewards export success but ignores public health, we will not serve people well.

Promoting British Food is not about being xenophobic – it’s grossly patronising to people to assume that only people who have the income and capacity to be aware of food issues are bothered about the source of their food. Anybody, whatever amount of money they have, and whatever their food purchasing habits – if they were asked, “Does it matter to you where your food comes from, do you want your food to support a vibrant local economy and pleasant looking countryside?” – would say yes. Imagine if we all had a say in how our country looked.

If people want to make their own bread with British flour during British Food Fortnight, even people who normally struggle with bloating or negative reactions after eating commercial bread, they can buy our fantastic flour on our website. It was talking with countless people, as far back as the 1970s, about the fact that they could eat my bakery bread, but not commercial bread, that tipped me into thinking about this. We believe bread matters, and we want an alternative food system and economy. We are building it one loaf at a time. Why not join us?

As part of our series exploring the British Food stories of some of our borrowers for British Food Fortnight, we spoke to Claire Pritchard CEO of the Greenwich Co-operative Development Agency – the GCDA – about what British Food means to them.

Co-op & Community Finance (CCF) has been a supporter of GCDA since its beginnings in 1982. GCDA, unlike many other Co-op Development agencies established at the same time, has thankfully stood the test of time and is now more relevant than ever. Despite the long relationship It wasn’t until 2016 that they first approached us for a loan to help them grow into new areas of trading to help underpin their core co-op development work. At that time we were able to broker a deal through the Co-op Loan Fund, a fund established in 2006 managed by CCF on behalf of a consortium of Co-op Retail Societies, and also fellow social lender Big Issue Invest. Since then, through CCF, the Co-op Loan Fund has been able to support them twice more as they have expanded and diversified further.

CEO Claire says, “Traditionally, we’ve been a co-op and social enterprise development agency. We’ve broadened that scope and now work in four main areas – co-ops, social enterprise and community business support; public health; adult learning; and anchor buildings. These are hubs from where we deliver our programmes. Food is and has been a key theme across all of these areas for many years now., and its fair to say we grew our agency through food.

We started with a key aim to increase access to affordable food across our communities. As soon as you look at it like that, you have to come back to sustainability. What is the impact of our food on us, on our environment, our health? The role of food in public health is huge and so that impacts onto both individuals and the economy too.

Food security matters too. We started asking what can be grown locally, what’s the quality of that, how is it produced, what is the impact of the production on the communities where it grows, on the local economy. It’s all interconnected.

We know that urban areas like ours are never going to be entirely self sustaining, but there is some really good primary production in and around Greenwich and we’ve had a hand in a good number of those ventures. We have Keats Organics – a small, half-acre farm in Bexley, growing organically raised, hand tended salad, herbs and vegetables – that we put funding into. And then there’s Sitopia Farm which is really exciting too, it’s a social enterprise growing food to advance social, environmental and health objectives, based on a book called Sitopia which is all about how food can save the world. There’s also local coffee roasting, and the fantastic city farm London Woodlands Farm Trust which hosts Sitopia. There were great community food assets here before we started and we’re proud to have been a catalyst for change and development from what was a fantastic, strong food foundation.

After we’ve thought about production, there’s supply and distribution. It can be hard for people in our area to get hold of good quality fresh fruit and vegetables – local shops offer very little (if any at all) fresh food produce and it is typically stocked below the eye-line on the bottom of shelves). Before COVID, we facilitated fruit and vegetable stalls in four local areas, selling a selection of seasonal fruit and vegetables. Each week a total of 500kg fruit and vegetables was sold at affordable prices to 300 residents and families. As we move out of the pandemic, we are exploring ways to ensure fresh produce is made available to people.

Greenwich is a place of huge diversity and food gives us ways to tap into, share, and celebrate our diverse cultures, it supports real community and social cohesion. Awareness days give us a real opportunity to have these conversations. When you’re an organisation like us, curating a range of projects, anchor events allow you to tell a story alongside those things. They mean we can focus on a specific thing and then create all our other activities around it and have a bigger impact. So, for British Food Fortnight, we might have cooking lessons using locally grown veg as part of our adult learning activity, along with information about nutrition for our health work, and we’d focus these activities in our hub buildings and out presence at local markets.

Local people with an interest in food can join in with our food related activities and cookery clubs through the fortnight and all year round – it’s all on our website.

And if people are going to be visiting Greenwich during British Food Fortnight, we’d love to chat about the importance of food in Greenwich. We’ll be at our market in Woolwich, at the Royal Arsenal on the 24th September from 10am-3pm.

As part of our series exploring the British Food stories of some of our borrowers for British Food Fortnight, we spoke to Shaun Donnelly, Managing Director of Bishopwearmouth Co-operative Garden Centre and Tea Room in Sunderland. 

The co-op provides employment and voluntary opportunities for adults with disabilities in catering and horticulture and we were proud to support them in 2018 with a loan to buy a Victorian lodge house – this is now the home of The Lodge Tea Room.

Shaun explained, 

‘The Tea Room is incredibly popular. We’re open seven days a week, serving breakfast from 9am until 11.30, light lunches, our famous pies and quiches, as well as a fantastic, seasonally varying, selection of homemade cakes and sweet treats. We’ve a huge range of teas and coffees, with options for vegan and other diets too, and our Sunday roasts are incredibly popular. And we have a few doggie options for our canine friends! We’re right next to the Bishopwearmouth Cemetery, which is the biggest cemetery in Europe. It’s a beautiful, Gothic cemetery and it’s really popular with dog walkers, so we have a space where dogs and their owners can rest their weary feet and refresh themselves, alongside a pet-free space for those who might be allergic. 

People love that we are using this old building, they love the setting. The Lodge has a beautiful walled garden and people tell us how much they love to sit there, soaking up the atmosphere. We know that people love our work supporting people with disabilities and of course, they also love our food!

We’re really proud to work with fantastic local suppliers. We work with a dairyman and a butcher based within a mile of us – our milk, cream and a lot of our meat is very local. Our popular cheese scones are made with Yorkshire cheese, and our bread is all made in the north east too. It’s really important to us to support local business and provide local products – we have great food here in the north east and we want to celebrate and enjoy it.

If people are visiting us throughout British Food Fortnight, the one thing I’d recommend they try is our Afternoon Tea. I can’t tell you what will be in it as it changes with the seasons and what we have made each day. There will always be a mix of savoury and sweet, with your hot drink of choice – you might find a slice of freshly baked quiche nestled alongside a finger sandwich or two, with a mini cheesecake or individual mini trifle, or a piece of homemade shortbread. And there will always be a cream scone, plain or fruited – it wouldn’t be afternoon tea without it! We’re planning our Christmas menu now and really excited about the treats we’re going to be offering.”

See more photos of The Lodge tasty treats here and find out how to get to them here. 

British Food Fortnight starts today and runs to the 2nd October. It is an annual celebration of the diverse and delicious food that Britain produces.

British Food is central to many of our borrowers work. We all need to eat, and food is used in ingenious ways by those working to build a better world. Whether that’s a tea room creating jobs for vulnerable people, a return to growing fields of gazing grain and grinding them into flour, or communities coming together to learn and cook – it’s a delicious way to do good.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll share stories from organisations we’ve been pleased to support, with information on how YOU can support them too.

We hope you enjoy the series and that you eat some great British Food this fortnight, and beyond.

If you are a food business, check out the resources for the Fortnight on the website – there are sections for pubs, retailers and more in the right hand Resources dropdown.