Good Practice Guide for Social Enterprises Working on Food, Wellbeing and Sustainability

UKRI Transforming UK Food Systems
July 2024

Summary

The Social Enterprise Food Systems project has been exploring how social enterprises can introduce innovations for healthy and sustainable food. We are delighted to launch our Good Practice Guide, which draws on our research, the experiences of our social enterprise partners involved in the project, and is authored by Kim Graham from our partner Shared Assets.

This guide is for any initiatives that want to start up and sustain activities that use a social enterprises approach (i.e. meeting social and environmental aims through trading activity and grants). The guide sets out topics to consider ranging from the early stages of start up through to scaling what works through growing organisations or simply sharing ideas. Through all this, there is a need to consider how those involved care for themselves and others. The guide identifies a range of ways that social enterprises can be the alternative needed to transform the UK food system. 

This guide was developed in collaboration with our social enterprise partners (Windmill Hill City Farm, London Early Years Foundation, Cultivate, Community Transport Glasgow, Selby Trust, Social AdVentures, Social Enterprise UK, and Shared Assets along side researchers from Middlesex, Surrey and Glasgow Caledonian Universities. Academic partners include Kate Burningham, Patrick Elf, Michael Gargaro, Zoe Harris, Anastasia Loukianov, Fergus Lyon, Micaela Mazzei, Monique Raats, Michael Roy, Bianca Stumbitz, Ian Vickers, and Doirean Wilson with funding from UKRI Transforming UK Food Systems programme.

Further Reading