How councils can embed participation into their work to combat food poverty and build a better food system

Sustain’s London Food Poverty Campaign has two core strands of work: 1) advocating for councils to implement policies and programmes that address food poverty, like universal free school meals or paying the Living Wage, and 2) working with people who themselves are struggling with poverty to co-design or co-produce these solutions.

Now we are beginning to bring these two strands of work together, by learning about what councils themselves can do to co-design or co-produce their work on better food systems with residents facing poverty. This briefing paper sets out our preliminary findings on what councils are doing and can do in this vein, as well as some core principles for how to do this work at its best.