Local food-growing initiatives respond to the Covid-19 crisis: enhancing well-being, building community for better futures

Lead Research Organisation: The Open University
Department Name: Faculty of Arts and Social Sci (FASS)

Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis has revealed the stark inequalities in UK society. Many vulnerable people have
had more difficulty accessing food, so third-sector organisations have mobilised emergency food
provision. They have also expanded community food-growing initiatives, which enhance
participants' well-being, strengthen social cohesion, localise food provision and thus build future
resilience. This project will investigate the expansion of community cultivation during the Covid-
19 crisis, its benefits, social barriers and means to overcome them, especially for more vulnerable
marginalised social groups, with the aim to strengthen third-sector capacities for such inclusion.
Through participatory digital story-telling, this project will work with third-sector partners in
community cultivation to elicit participants' feelings, aspirations, social connections and multiple
benefits from community food activities. This knowledge will identify the most effective strategies
that have been deployed during the Covid-19 crisis, and devise ways to share and promote them.
Thus the digital story-telling process has a dual purpose: a research method and a means to
promote better practices through our third-sector partners. As a practical impact, food growing
activities will strengthen their engagement with vulnerable marginalised people, thus helping to
overcome inequalities. Based on the digital assets and research insights, the project will provide
an open-access online capacity-building programme for community food programmes, so that
they can outscale similar benefits around the country. This impacts will promote better mental
health, well-being and better access to healthy food; they will also spread agri-food practices that
enhance social resilience, and thus provide an alternative to the unhealthy, unsustainable agrifood
system.
 
Title "Lavender Place Community Gardens: the evolution of an urban oasis" 
Description In Reading city centre a temporary vacant space was turned into an urban oasis. It attracted multiple activities including refugee groups and a Global Garden with plants from their places of origin. When trying to spread the example, however, the organizers encountered obstacles from the fragmented policies of the local authority. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2022 
Impact When the space had to be given up in 2022, the film generated enthusiasm and commitment for the necessary work to establish a community garden in a new space. 
URL https://vimeo.com/showcase/6851866/video/776694003
 
Title 'Calthorpe Community Garden: an oasis building community in central London', Click on the CC icon to obtain the subtitles. 
Description In central London, where few people have their own garden spaces, people have sought access via this garden. Its activities create community through multiple activities and social bonds among diverse groups. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2022 
Impact When the film was screened, participants identified with the feeling that 'We belong here'. It reinforced their social bonds. 
URL https://vimeo.com/751171844
 
Title 'Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden: inter-generational learning builds community', 
Description This Garden has weekly sessions bringing together adults and children, sharing their skills and enthusiasms. The garden's activities link cultivation, cooking and herbal remedies. The Coordinator brings special skills in stimulating participants' interest through inter-generational learning. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2022 
Impact See screening event on 6 November 2022 
URL https://vimeo.com/754435021
 
Description In our project, 'Grassroots Visual Storytelling about Community Food Growing', participants in such initiatives have made short films about their experiences. The films demonstrate multiple societal benefits, e.g. emotional well-being, self-confidence, cooperative relationships and mutual learning. As their films show, the Covid-19 pandemic created difficulties for food-growing initiatives but stimulated efforts to sustain or even expand them. The activities inspired people's enthusiasm and skills to extend food-growing beyond their own initiative.

From the spring 2021 films, the First Insights page described participants' efforts to overcome social isolation by sustaining or even expanding food initiatives, thus maintaining benefits such as health and well-being. Despite Covid restrictions, participants got to know each other better and extended friendship networks across social differences of ethnicity, national origin and age. While fulfilling their own needs, participants also felt they were doing socially useful activities, such as supplying food banks and learning skills for locally produced food. Cultivation skills were extended to homes, schools and other food growing spaces. Participants' films described how their involvement in community food growing strengthened people's enthusiasm and cultivation skills for localizing food production. At least implicitly, the films illustrate the 'people skills' of key staff members who inspire enthusiasm and cooperative relationships among volunteers.

From the autumn 2021 films, the Second Insights page explains some difficulties of community gardens: On the one hand, participants had experienced doubts about whether their food initiative could prevail over various obstacles (especially during the pandemic), thus potentially deterring or limiting their commitments. On the other hand, many participants have brought hopes for rebuilding the future differently, both within and beyond food initiatives, as an inspiration for greater commitments, solidaristic bonds and a food culture.

To elicit such themes in the films, the autumn course prepared stimulus materials about storytelling styles and roles: Stories can help us to understand how group experiences encounter difficulties and cope with them, thus inspiring others to develop similar practices. Otherwise stressful experiences can become bearable and be turned into social connections that evoke positive emotions. Sharing such personal stories helps participants to form interdependent support networks where people can listen to, hold space for and support each other, thus creating or expanding community. We called this process 'community flourishing'.

The course materials also introduced the concept of radical hopefulness. This means practices which acknowledge difficult issues and emotions, as a basis of responding with care and putting this care into practice. By such means, collective practices can not only envision a better future, but also enact or prefigure this future in the present. For the food-growing theme of this course, radical hopefulness can inspire practical steps towards transforming the agri-food system.

From the autumn 2021 course, the visual stories encompassed diverse food-growing initiatives beyond community gardens. Each in its own way, novel forms of community emerged from people who otherwise would not have met each other. The films also give an inside view of how food-growing initiatives have dealt with participants' difficulties and inspirations. In each initiative, common practices generated group engagements, built community bonds, enhanced cooperative skills and envisaged collective contributions to a better future. Some initiatives had activities or impacts beyond community gardens, indicating a wider transformational potential.

From the spring 2022 course, we drew the following conclusions.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, people were seeking ways to overcome social isolation in ways that avoid the virus. When learning about nearby community gardens, people had various ambivalent responses - hopeful, but also anxious about finding a congenial, safe place there. Garden organizers made newcomers feel welcome at doing whatever activities suited them, be they solo or group tasks. Some parents sought social activities for their children and then they became regular volunteer gardeners. Some people organized new gardens, attracting numerous volunteers.

Across diverse forms and origins, community food-growing (CFG) has created spaces for sharing skills, anxieties, hopes and wider experiences. Such activity has elicited generous, reciprocal and empathetic relationships, where people get to know each other better. As well as the intrinsic enjoyment, participants gain satisfaction that the food has socially beneficial uses by fellow volunteers, neighbours, community cafés and/or food banks. Participants value the contribution to environmentally sustainable food production, as a response to the climate crisis and as a model for wider replication. Such patterns appear in the project's videos.

Moreover, these videos highlight group processes that generate enthusiasm, combine diverse gardening skills, share the skills, stimulate new friendships and so attract more participants. Staff brought social skills that facilitated those group processes. From an initial impulse to overcome social isolation, a community-building process has stimulated a greater social involvement and collective ambition through the initiatives. They have been prefiguring a creative societal cooperation, perhaps even an alternative agri-food system, as a form of 'radical hopefulness'. Here are brief introductions to the video stories:

Community food-growing can be seen in a wider context: For several decades, social cooperation has been channelled into narrowly instrumental or transactional forms, especially for coping with social inequalities, work stresses and competitive pressures of the job market. Social contact was being increasingly structured by social media. This marginalised traditional empathetic cooperation, whereby 'we send empathic signals to another person that we are attending and recognising what they are doing or thinking'. People have felt a social need to recover 'the value of face-to-face relations', said the sociologist Richard Sennett.

The Covid-19 pandemic further constrained in-person contact, thereby shifting inter-personal contact to public parks and social media. As a significant exception, the government's Covid-19 rules permitted small groups to do gardening together. Its practical tasks became a rare opportunity for rediscovering and remaking inter-personal relationships.

Neither simply work nor leisure, group food-growing is a voluntary 'civil labour' which builds community. This activity features playful relationships with fellow gardeners, the natural world and its domesticated garden-forms. Successful initiatives depend on participants' empathy with each other's feelings, inspirations, enthusiasms and hopes. These practices have been facilitated by staff and regular volunteers bringing relevant social skills, sometimes called 'people skills'.

Community food growing (CFG) involves those processes of community-building and place-making. Participants' video stories have made more visible some key aspects, namely:
-- solidaristic mutual-aid relationships around food-growing, cooking, eating and distribution;
cooperative, creative, adaptive capacities for collectively responding to common difficulties;
-- empathetic bonds among participants who did not previously know each other (across various differences such as ethnicity, age and prior skills);
-- a food culture, i.e. participants strengthening the knowledge and supply of healthy food, through their dual roles as both producers and consumers; and
-- the social-organizational skills for facilitating and inspiring those group practices.

Beyond such benefits to themselves, many participants see group food-growing as promoting better ways for our society to organize and feed itself. This activity builds capacities for an environmentally sustainable, socially equitable agri-food system. Community food-growing strengthens the relevant capacities, skills, enthusiasms and pleasures. This offers a radically hopeful basis for building community, towards creating a better future, both through and beyond community food-growing. Video stories provide means to highlight, share and spread such experiences. The process of creating the video stories generates deeper engagement and reflection amongst participants, directly strengthening the community food-growing initiative.

Policy implications: Many urban and peri-urban spaces are potentially available for expanding community food-growing (CFG); policy support for secure land access and site maintenance remains important for group commitments. As key insights from the video stories, moreover, successful initiatives depend on social-organizational skills to facilitate self-confidence, conversations, empathetic cooperation and place attachments among volunteers. Long-term policy support could help CFG initiatives to strengthen their collective capacities for this placemaking process. CFG links many activities and benefits including health, well-being, art, storytelling, social cohesion, etc. All this relates to many Council policies, but they generally remain fragmented across responsibilities. Community capacities can provide a focus for local authorities to integrate otherwise disparate policy areas of support measures.
Exploitation Route Cooperative, community-building skills have relevance to wider voluntary sector.

Those capacities can inform ways for Local Authorities to integrate support measures across otherwise fragemented responsibilities. See policy section.

These findings will be applied in an OU-funded project, 'Community-driven policy innovation for local food-growing', starting April 2023 for one year.
Sectors Communities and Social Services/Policy
URL https://cobracollective.org/news/radically_hopeful_cooperation
 
Description As noted in previous sections, the short films have been used by our third-sector partners on two occasions, though the impacts remain somewhat intangible as regards generating enthusiasm for community gardens. Calthorpe Community Garden hosted the 24th September event, whose discussion solidified the participants' sense of building community bonds at the site over several years or decades (in some cases). Sustain hosted the 1st December webinar to use the findings for several purposes: to publicise the benefits of community gardens, to promote storytelling about them, to encourage more participants to join the course and likewise to get involved in such gardens. Sustain received queries about how to get involved.
First Year Of Impact 2021
Sector Communities and Social Services/Policy
Impact Types Societal
 
Title Continuous online course in visual storytelling 
Description Before the project began, the Cobra Collective already had an ongoing free online course, Grassroots Visual Storytelling. It has been available on the OpenLearnCreate website, It began with material from collaboration with indigenous communities in South America. It has added material from the three instalments of this project. Thus it offers more diverse perspectives and more familiar reference points for UK participants. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2020 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact Using this online course, more people have learned how to make their own video stories. 
URL https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/course/view.php?id=7086
 
Title Video stories about community food growing 
Description The project was structured as a course, whose participants made their own short films, which serve as both data and art. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2022 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact Neither simply work nor leisure, group food-growing is a voluntary 'civil labour' which builds community. This activity features playful relationships with fellow gardeners, the natural world and its domesticated garden-forms. Successful initiatives depend on participants' empathy with each other's feelings, inspirations, enthusiasms and hopes. These practices have been facilitated by staff and regular volunteers bringing relevant social skills, sometimes called 'people skills'. Community food growing (CFG) involves those processes of community-building and place-making. Participants' video stories have made more visible some key aspects, namely: -- solidaristic mutual-aid relationships around food-growing, cooking, eating and distribution; cooperative, creative, adaptive capacities for collectively responding to common difficulties; -- empathetic bonds among participants who did not previously know each other (across various differences such as ethnicity, age and prior skills); -- a food culture, i.e. participants strengthening the knowledge and supply of healthy food, through their dual roles as both producers and consumers; and -- the social-organizational skills for facilitating and inspiring those group practices. The process of making and screening the films reinforced social bonds around those processes, stimulating greater commitments. 
URL https://vimeo.com/showcase/6851866
 
Description Calthorpe Community Garden event 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact In our course the storytellers expressed interest to attend or help organize screenings of the films at their own community garden. But suitable facilities were a problem: the Covid-19 precautions deterred the use of their buildings for such purposes. As a major exception, the Calthorpe Community Garden has a separate building with good ventilation. So in September 2021 this was the venue for our first in-person engagement event, inviting participants from all over London. Approx 30 attended. The subsequent discussion expressed and reinforced volunteers' sense of group belonging, spanning differences in ethnic origin, age, skills, etc. 'We feel at home here', as many said. This role was emphasised in our report, https://cobracollective.org/news/calthorpe-community-garden/
Our third-sector partner Sustain did its own brief report, https://www.sustainweb.org/blogs/oct21-digital-storytelling-stimulates-conversation-community-garden/
Both reports were widely circulated to Sustain's network of several hundred food initiatives and likewise the Calthorpe's local community networks.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://cobracollective.org/news/calthorpe-community-garden/
 
Description Capital Growth's Inter-Council network meeting, 13 June 2022 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Capital Growth has a London-wide network of Council officers who promote community food-growing. Eight of them, along with five civil society representatives, attended our joint webinar to discussed our project results. They expressed appreciation for the insights on how they could offer more effective policy support. These included 5-year leases on food-growing sites and capacity-building training events.

This discussion stimulated the idea for a follow-up action-research project on community-driven policy change for food growing. Funded by the OU, this starts in spring 2023.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Film screening at Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden, 6 November 2022 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact In the storytelling course, a volunteer at Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden Nieves Gomez made a short film, 'Gardening During Coronavirus Pandemic'. Her film highlighted the Coordinator's role in enthusing everyone to learn gardening skills by sharing knowledge. This focus gave the project team the idea to make its own film there,
"Josiah Braithwaite Community Garden: inter-generational learning builds community" (see URL below).

This event screened both films for an on-site audience of approx. 15 people plus several more participating via a Zoom link. The discussion generated comments such as these:

Every day you learn something from the garden and the other people there. Everyone in the family gets involved. The whole family appreciates what they can learn and contribute there.

Kids are learning from people they don't normally meet. They come out of their shell and look after each other. This makes it a safe place to visit.

Traditional knowledge is passed on to the younger generation. It could be simple things such us how your grandmother used to plant seeds, bake biscuits or spin cotton.

In the garden, adults remember things that they used to do or know when they were children.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://vimeo.com/754435021
 
Description Podcast 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact This 30-minute podcast describes the storytelling course and some insights from the films: It includes comments from the project researchers and third-sector partners. It was developed with the Pandemic and Beyond project, Episode 8 in their series, The Pandemic and Beyond, https://pandemicandbeyond.exeter.ac.uk/media/podcasts/
The link was circulated to the OU's media contact list (or other list?). It was also circulated by the third-sector partners to their several hundred contacts in community gardens.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://pandemicandbeyond.exeter.ac.uk/media/podcasts/
 
Description Promoting community food growing through digital storytelling, 3 May 2022 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact This online training session on digital storytelling explored ways to promote community food growing initiatives with meaningful and emotionally engaging stories.
Publicity said:
"This afternoon online session with Cobra Collective will introduce you to digital storytelling techniques which will enable you to create short audio-visual recordings of the wonderful benefits of community food growing. You will learn about key concepts that can drive your story (e.g. community flourishing, radical hopefulness), approaches to storyboarding, key recording techniques (e.g. lighting, framing, composition), simple video editing and the promotion of your videos through social media channels."

The invitation was widely advertised it via the Capital Growth social media channels. It attracted approx. 20 participants. Some went on to do the online course
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://www.capitalgrowth.org/training/may-3-digital-storytelling-for-food-growing
 
Description Tutor-led training course 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact Tutor-led training course
As the project's core activity, it runs a tutor-led course where participants in community food-growing learn the skills to make a short film telling a story from their experience. So far the course has run in spring and autumn 2021. For both terms, our third-sector partners widely circulated the invitation. Many people expressed interest to join the course, but fewer did so, and even fewer completed a film. This had many reasons, especially because people were facing the extra burdens of the pandemic, as well the great time-commitment necessary to plan and make a film. In the spring 2021 course, some participants had expressed interest to learn film-editing skills so that they could have greater, faster control over the process. In response the autumn 2021 course introduced these skills and encouraged all participants to learn them through the WeVideo website; they did so, except for one who did not complete a film. In this way, the skills training was strengthened. Participants expressed great appreciation for the opportunity to learn the skills and make the films. As one said, 'I have gained a superpower'. This process was simultaneously an engagement with food-growing initiatives, both directly through the storytellers and indirectly through their many conversations with fellow contibutors to their community garden.

Each course resulted in approximately 8 films, all publicly available on the Vimeo page https://vimeo.com/showcase/6851866
For each season's course, the project provided an analytical overview of the film-stories and their practical implications. The second overview has a link to the first one, https://cobracollective.org/news/second-insights-community-food-growing/
This site has 135 visits by early March 2022.
The previous site with First Insights had 229 visits by March 2022.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://cobracollective.org/news/second-insights-community-food-growing/
 
Description Webinar for community gardens 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact On 1st December 2021 the project held a webinar explaining how the course had generated films about participants' experiences of community gardens and general patterns of the stories. It was co-hosted by Social Farms & Gardens with Sustain, our third-sector partner. They each circulated the announcement to a few hundred food initiatives. Publicity and registration page:
https://www.sustainweb.org/webinars/nov21-digital-storytelling-about-food-growing/
Attendance was approx. 70 people.
Recording of the webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsL_7gG5B_U

Both third-sector organizations circulated those links to their several hundred contacts.
This publicity raised interest in viewing the recording and the project's films on the Vimeo page, https://vimeo.com/showcase/6851866
Many participants likewise circulated the link to colleagues within or beyond their community garden. The webinar also generated expressions of interest in the spring 2022 course.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsL_7gG5B_U