National Food Co-ops Conference & Networking Event

2nd February 2009

As part of the Making Local Food Work programme Sustain is organising a national food co-ops conference and networking event on Monday 2 February 2009  10am - 4pm at 76 Portland Place, London W1B 1NT.

The conference is free for volunteers and community workers but we will be charging a fee of £50 for PCTs and local authorities to help us subsidise travel costs for volunteers.

The main focus of the conference is on helping food co-ops and other community-run food outlets become more sustainable. The conference aims to provide a forum to facilitate networking, sharing experience, launching the new food co-ops toolkit and, through a number of workshops, sharing findings on areas investigated in the first year of the programme.

The keynote speaker will be Martin Caraher, reader in Food and Health Policy at City University. He has worked extensively on issues related to local sustainable food supplies, the role of co-ops in promoting health, farmers markets and food access. There will also be presentations from food co-ops from around the country, from both rural and urban areas, representing different models of good practice and the morning session will include a round table discussion on some of the issues these food co-ops have raised.

In the afternoon workshops covering areas such as needs assessment, governance, suppliers, education, administering food co-ops, marketing and volunteer support will be covered, led by our partners in the Making Local Food Work programme including; Somerset Community Food, F3, Food Chain North East, London Food Link, Greenwich Co-operative Development Agency, the Soil Association and Newham Food Access Partnership.

A booking form can be downloaded below;

National Food Coops Conference Booking Form

 - once completed this should be e-mailed to foodcoops@sustainweb.org or posted to Sustain, 94 White Lion St, London N19P.

Please book as soon as possible as places are limited. Once you have booked we will contact you again in January to confirm your workshop choices and provide you with other details.

We will have a limited number of travel bursaries available for volunteers; if you would like to be eligible please try to book as soon as possible.

Download a pdf of the programme here.