Community gardening, creativity and everyday culture: food growing and embedded researchers in community transformation and connections

This pilot demonstrator project will show the potential and challenges of shared creative activities involving members of communities and researchers, and their capacity for developing community identities and transformative experiences. The outcomes will include creative acts and objects as well as written material which will demonstrate in a highly innovative manner to both community and research stakeholders that a creative process involving communities and embedded researchers can produce new knowledge and connect communities.

The proposed project will work with three communities involved in communal food growing in Sussex, Manchester and inner London who differ in terms of class, ethnicity and sexuality and have used creative acts to develop on-going connections. The community collaborators involve a community farm, a city farm and a lesbian and bi-sexual youth work project. The project will document and analyse the process of communities sharing creative acts and the spaces in which this occurs in order to reveal how creativity influences community identity and connectivity.

There a number of reasons for the focus on communities involved in communal food growing. Communal and individual food growing is a rapidly growing phenomenon whose significance for communities is not fully understood. The number of community gardens in England in 2010 was four times greater than in 2005 and a number of public bodies have funded new communal food growing projects. For example, the Capital Growth project in London supported by the Mayor of London and the Big Lottery Fund aim to create 2,012 growing spaces. Food growing has become increasingly popular in western Europe in the last decade with the fastest national rates of growth found in the UK, where the proportion of the population involved has risen from 4% to 14% in the short period between 2003 and 2007.

The proposed project will build on four current Connected Communities Programme (CCP) projects:

Connecting Communities through Food: The History of Community Supported Agriculture in the UK;
Connecting health, health-behaviours and place through the work of community gardening;
Community Music: History and Current Practice, its constructions of 'Community', Digital Turns and Future Soundings;
A Communities of Practice model to contribute to community cohesion and self-reliance.

Two of these CCP projects have involved the establishment of embedded researchers within food growing communities. Embedded researchers are part of the community being researched and are designed to develop 'deep' connections between communities and research institutions. This approach to research, however, is 'risky' as it can raise a range of ethical, institutional, personal and professional dilemmas that often only emerge once the research process is underway. The proposed project will analyse the experience of embedded researchers to demonstrate how an inclusive arts-based research approach involving such researchers can stimulate creative acts that facilitate transformative moments for individuals and communities.

The techniques used in the project are wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary. They are designed to encourage joint working between community and university collaborators. The techniques include:

- Community priority identification meetings to establish the community goals for the project;
- Skill building where community members and researchers jointly improve their research and creative
skills;
- Community creative exchanges where communities share creative outputs with similar communities;
- Films and interviews documenting the creative exchanges;
- Workshops involving all partners to consider the role of embedded researchers;
- Community led presentations of creative outputs to similar communities;

The findings will be widely disseminated to a range of communities involved in communal food growing.

This project brings multiple impacts. One of these is in itself contributing to the emerging impact agenda, and specifically beginning to articulate how this agenda might be shaped by the Connected Communities Programme, as well as contributing more generally to emerging expertise of developing robust community-university partnerships. However beyond these impacts, we see this particular project as offering 2 specific contributions and insights. The first is focussed on the role of embedded researchers in community-university partnerships; the second on the role of capacity building for community leaders, gatekeepers, and key partners.

We feel that academics are often reluctant to engage in community-based research because of the lack of specific guidance that is available on the challenges it raises (e.g. in methodology and ethics). This project aims to use the focus on food growing as a way into expanding the practice and dissemination of community-based research in the fields of, for example, sociologies and geographies of food, and so to considerably expand the range of sites where research involving community-university partnerships is discussed and considered central to more mainstream disciplines. Thus some of the impact of this project will consist in presenting conference papers and producing articles which will appear in mainstream disciplinary journals. In this, the project benefits from a cross-disciplinary academic team, combined with community-based research and community arts expertise.

We also aim to contribute to the field of community-university partnerships, by intentionally focusing on a particular manifestation of community-based research, that involving embedded researchers. At a time when many universities and research bodies more widely are keen to develop community-university partnerships, we feel that one expedient approach to this is to support academic researchers who may already be embedded in various communities and who may be keen to develop this involvement as a research project given appropriate support, recognition and resources. Hence our intention to produce a freely available toolkit which will work through key moments of the process of community-based research involving embedded researchers, addressing central issues such as ethics, participatory research processes, as well as providing links to a range of further resources available.

Our second distinctive impact is around creating capacity for community organisations. We have learned from our current project of the appetite which community partners have for input from academic researchers, and of their capacity and desire for critical reflection on their work, as well as how the space for this kind of work is limited in many of the frontline projects in which they are engaged. In this way, community-university partnerships appear to provide an invaluable space outside of the usual constraints of much community work for critical reflection on the practice of community work in the context of sustained academic research conversations. Thus as well as more generally building capacity in community groups through the project, we see one of the specific ways in which CCP projects produce impact is in the increased capacities of frontline workers and community gatekeepers, particularly enabled by the community priority identification meetings, in addition to the extensive community exchange meetings planned. To this end we will also discuss with community partners the possibilities of producing a further toolkit for community groups engaged in research with academic partners.

We are particularly keen to develop ways of sharing the emerging learnings of this project with other participants in the CCP, either through the project website, or through other modes and forms, depending on participants' interests and capacities. Thus this project will contribute to emerging best practice in community-university partnerships.