Community Wealth Building - Tower Hamlets Food Partnership Quarterly Meetup

NEW LOCATION AND DATE FOR MARCH MEETUP! 

Location: Leaders In Community, Teviot Centre, E14 6QD

Date and time: March 27th, 1-2.30pm

*Our March meetup will be led by none other than Romana Gill, local food coop coordinator, creative all-rounder, social entrepreneur, and now Grassroots Food Policy Advocate!

Want to discuss what Community Wealth Building could look like in Tower Hamlets?  This discussion is taking place across the Borough - in many spaces and within many groups - often amongst people who also want to see the food system transform. In this Quarterly Meetup, we invite you to bring your discussions to this space, to connect with others having similar conversations, and to share what you've been working on. Let's connect the dots, and build this movement. 

In case you want to know why Tower Hamlets Food Partnership meets up to discuss Community Wealth Building - this forms one of our 6 Strategic Focus areas, outlined in our collaboratively produced Strategy, also outlined below.

Strategic Theme 2: COMMUNITY WEALTH BUILDING - Define and implement a Tower Hamlets based model for Community Wealth Building, aiming for a dual model of community wealth building that supports ground-up circular community wealth building, and council/ anchor institution led community wealth building policies simultaneously.

Why?

For true food justice and security, we need to give communities in Tower Hamlets the resources—like space, tools, and funding—to do the work sustainably. Instead of relying on short-term grants, we want to build lasting community wealth by exploring circular economic models that connect grassroots groups with bigger institutions, recycling resources and sharing wealth across our food, land, and waste systems.

How?

• Conduct a literature review on community wealth building, donut economics, and circular economy models, highlighting initiatives in and beyond Tower Hamlets to inform framework for action. Discuss & decide upon suitable framework for implementation.

• Use framework to implement a model that is generates wealth for Tower Hamlets Community members both from grassroots base and from top-down anchor institutions

Grassroots Wealth Building

• Increase good employment across food sector & Increase inclusion of Trade Unions in this work

• Increase support for local, green good businesses and social enterprises by local residents

• Increase resources available to local, community based solutions and innovations based on circular economy principles, to scale-up, replicate, and experiment. ‘Innovation’ in this case goes beyond tech-based innovation – for example, innovations in community engagement, or in low-fi solutions to genuine needs, e.g. alternatives to supermarkets that increase food access, and are financially self-sustaining even though they do not aim to (and do not) make any profit

• Increase circularity of ‘waste’ within food economy – for example by linking caterers to local composting and food waste projects

• Explore what a campaign for Wealth Redistribution within Tower Hamlets could look like

Anchor Institution led wealth building

• Work with Tower Hamlets Council to improve procurement across the board to become more local where appropriate, imported ethically where appropriate, socially just, and environmentally just

• Work towards Tower Hamlets becoming a London Living Wage Borough – across entire borough

• Explore how procurement by council and other large institutions could support small scale local food growers and producers, and related social enterprises (e.g. composting)

• Increase support for institutions such as schools to build up circular food systems for example in terms of composting food waste