Food in the City, on 4 December 2024, generated conversation and ideas about what Southampton needs to do to become a healthy and sustainable food city. Southampton’s new Food Partnership is growing and has recently been accepted as a Sustainable Food Places member. This event gathered more evidence about local people’s priorities around the local food system.
Through a series of small table-based conversations at our favourite board games café Board in the City, we explored the collective wisdom in the room, sharing perspectives on the barriers that local people experience in terms of accessing healthy and sustainable food in Southampton.
Priorities for action around food in Southampton
The discussion generated a huge amount of ideas. To help us focus on what should happen next, we identified our top priorities, finishing with a voting process using paper straws. The following became the most important to the people in the room:
- Lobbying for representation about Southampton food issues to government, including the need for greater regulation of the food industry to address unhealthy and unsustainable food.
- Peer-to-peer learning across cultures, including chances for education, training about healthy/sustainable food and support for cooking skills. People want to see more encouragement of positive food cultures in households.
- A planning system that limits permissions for unhealthy food outlets and provides better physical access to healthy and sustainable food options in neighbourhoods, including places to grow food.
The people involved brought considerable expertise to the table, many of whom are involved in food, health, or sustainability projects. But we were also conscious that the people present at the event could not represent all the people of Southampton! These conversations could be extended to more communities to ensure that a wider range of perspectives are captured. After all, nothing will change regarding issues such as food inequality or unsustainable food systems, unless people are part of that change, and that action is based on local people’s wishes.
To join in with the Southampton Food Partnership, contact Becky Wilkinson at Southampton City Council. Everyone is welcome, it’s a broad partnership open to anyone.
The role of conversations and coproduction
Our Food in the City event had another purpose too; to develop skills and knowledge around the World café method of having community conversations. A team of us got together to learn about this method and trial our hosting skills at this event. This was in direct response to the recommendations that emerged from the Southampton Coproduction Corner’s Making Coproduction Meaningful work, which found that people wanted to learn more about how to facilitate sessions that foster shared working, including community voices and people with lived experience of issues that face local residents.
We are very grateful to the team of people who stepped forward to be part of hosting team. This included people from charities and social enterprises (including those specialising in community support, games and the arts), local universities, city council, and business. We hope that this will lead to more mutual support and partnership working around community conversations and shared decision-making.
We are writing a report of the event, which will be published here in early 2025: www.southamptonvs.org.uk/coproduction
You are welcome to join the Southampton Coproduction Corner mailing list and come to any of our events or activities. Contact coproduction@southamptonvs.org.uk