This workshop is part of a wider project from Incredible Edible and The University of Sheffield looking into opportunities and potentials for Right to Grow policies in the North of England. The Right To Grow isn’t just about growing food, but about repurposing public land to build resilient communities.

Through initial workshops with mixed groups in Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Hull, three key themes were identified which captured challenges and opportunities facing community food growing, through the lens of building resilient, adaptive cities for our future:

Bringing community food growing into local authority policy, both through new and specific policy, and through recognition within existing policy (ie health, climate etc)
Further developing collaboration across community groups, and between those groups and the local authority
Significantly amplifying narratives that demonstrate the holistic value of community food growing in cities, and how it contributes to civil resilience.

In this workshop we will build towards the development of a multi-city collaborative project. What we learned from the intial workshops was very much that Right to Grow cannot stand alone and must be woven into the tapestry of opportunities that are ahead of us in the realm of community food growing. The Right to Grow can, however, act as a maypole to dance around - with many different strands connected.

In this upcoming workshop we will discuss:

How could a collaborative project that works towards impactful Right to Grow policies in the four cities (and other Northern cities) support the above themes?

How can Right to Grow policies help to establish specific elements brought out within these themes?

How could a Right to Grow offer something to coalesce around and open doors to solve a wider range of challenges raised when discussing urban community food projects?

A coast-to-coast Right to Grow for community food growing