Coast and Vale Community Action: Growing Food Resilience on the Yorkshire Coast

Like many towns, Scarborough, on North Yorkshire’s Coast, is home to many people who are passionate about growing food.  The benefits of community food-growing – economically, socially, environmentally, and for people’s health – are well-established.  In particular, it has the potential to increase community resilience in the face of external shocks and pressures.  So why aren’t even more people growing their own food? And what is preventing successful food-growing initiatives from doing so on a larger scale?   

These are the central questions being addressed by Good to Grow, a 12 month project, led by CaVCA (Coast and Vale Community Action).  The project is funded by the Communities Innovating Yorkshire Fund - a commissioning programme delivered by the Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership (YPIP). YPIP is a regional project focused on academic, policy and community collaborative research on place based inclusive growth and sustainable living for informed decision-making.    Through the project CaVCA is working with community growing food-growing groups, school gardening groups, allotment associations, individual growers and people who do not do any growing, to investigate why more people in Scarborough don’t grow their own food and what more we can do to support them to do so.

We are linking this activity into the wider strategic policy context such as the Food for the Future North Yorkshire Framework for Action, Fix Our Food, and the academic networks we are reaching through YPIP.

Food growers seem naturally open to sharing and collaboration and we have set up a monthly Scarborough Food Growers get together where offers of help, sharing of information and discussion of big dreams as well as small, practical tricks and tips flow freely, whether that’s plans for new community growing spaces, ideas for making allotments more accessible, information on Scarborough’s seed library or bringing along bags of pet bedding for composting! The group is growing in size and will continue beyond the lifetime of the Good to Grow project.

We are currently running an online survey of Scarborough residents about asking for their thoughts on growing our own food locally, exploring why people do or don’t grow food, why they think community food growing is important (or why not), what practical support non-growers need to get started and what practical support people who are already growing food need to grow more.  The findings of the survey and the views of the Scarborough Food Growers group will shape the direction of the Good to Grow project over the Spring and Summer months and the kinds of practical support we can offer.  This is likely to include work to make taking an allotment on easier, supporting the development of at least one community allotment, support for growing workshops and learning activities, and community celebrations.

This is an exciting time for the development of community food growing in our area. As one of the survey respondents put it, “Growing our own food feels like a basic life skill that isn’t necessarily needed in the day to day but should there be a time when supermarkets aren’t able to provide – then it becomes a very important skill!”

To find out more contact david.stone@cavca.org.uk