The food scheme kept under wraps

East Ayrshire’s Dignified Food Programme has far-reaching benefits to its communities, tackling hunger in the area while simultaneously reducing food waste. Despite its enormously valuable work, it’s an initiative the council hopes residents do not know exists.

East Ayrshire is a local authority with a long history of increasing the availability of quality food to its residents. In 2005 the council started developing closer relationships with local suppliers to increase local produce in its school meals. Fast forward to 2017 and work on its Dignified Food Programme began in response to Brexit. This was further strengthened in the pandemic and is still growing as increasing numbers of residents face food and now fuel poverty.

The programme’s delivery requires close working between Mark Hunter, Strategic Lead Food and Facilities Support, and Kevin Wells, Strategic Lead for Communities, who are jointly overseen by Andrew Kennedy, Head of Facilities and Property Management at East Ayrshire Council.

The Dignified Food Programme was created out of a network of collaboration and close working between council departments. The overview was that we needed to find innovative ways to address high levels of deprivation, poor health, unemployment, and food bank dependency in our authority. We wanted to look at how we could take a more dignified approach and that included within the community but also within our schools.

The initiative started by providing free holiday activities for children where they would also be fed. “It is a stigma-free approach. A child would never know the purpose was to feed them, they are coming for an activity, and we feed them as part of the process. It could be child who is from a family who is destitute, and we know because they come every day and we see them take excess food home, but they are not distinguished,” said Wells.

The programme has grown, with the teams led by Hunter and Wells looking for ever more ways to collaborate, cut down on food waste and get food to those who need it in a non-stigmatised way. One of the approaches it took was looking at what was already operating in the community to see how it could support these schemes without taking them over. One example of this was the various community larders that already existed.

The food bank was predominately third sector voluntary organisations and is now a range of community groups interlaced with the work of the council. What we didn’t want to do was go in and say we are going to create this – it was about supporting the groups that were already there and finding out what worked. We could do the logistics and the volume, but it was still the organisations that were leading on it and had control of what was being delivered to each of the individual communities.

The council established a contract with food redistributor FareShare to help supply the larders, of which there are now plans for 17 in the area, up from a handful in 2017. The council gets them set up and ready to apply for funding, so they are less reliant on the authority. Guidance has been produced around food safety and coaching provided on the questions that can be asked by volunteers to gently guide users towards additional support, such as free school meals. The larders have a current but rapidly growing membership of 1,200 people who use the larders to access more affordable food and household items but also as a valuable community hub.

They come for a cup of tea and may use the larder or may not use the larder. They pay what they can and go home with some food that they can hopefully do something with.

Another strand of the Dignified Food Programme has been centred around reducing food waste while providing food to those who need it. “We now take our surplus food from the school counters and leave that in a dignified place at the end of the day for anyone who wants to take it home. It is labelled, packaged, and kept refrigerated if necessary and left at 3 o’ clock for young people to take. We don’t record it, but we know it is empty,” Hunter said. Another element has been educational work with the community and schools such as around the difference between best before and use-by dates. This, in turn, is impacting household waste. “I have responsibility for waste and waste management and that educational programme about how we make better use of the food we do have is having an impact on what I am seeing come through the bins,” noted Wells. The programme is also helping local businesses reduce carbon emissions, with more suppliers delivering locally.

When looking at this as a policy area, Kennedy advises starting slowly and aiming to get a wide buy- in from various stakeholders. “If you are going to start, start off slowly, look at what you have on your doorstep and have those engagement discussions with suppliers and communities to see what they need. It is also about having the buy-in from your council and Chief Executive and having an understanding that there may be an increase in costs but that it is an investment. The challenge is how are you going to do it and that will be different in every community, you really just need to get in amongst it,” he said.

Key though, is delivery of such a programme in a dignified way.

We are not putting that big pointing finger and saying you are in fuel poverty or in crisis, it is just ‘come in and be part of our family’. Behind the scenes, wrapped around that, it is about community, it is about food, and it is about support.

Kennedy agreed: “I would hope that nobody in East Ayrshire knows we have a Dignified Food Programme. We want people to recognise us for being caring, kind and connected and food plays a really strong part in that but, as soon as you label things you won’t succeed,” he concluded.