About

What is Food4Families?

Food4Families is an educational and development project that is sponsored by Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC), who have extensive experience in devising and delivering educational programmes and materials in the formal sector.

Food4Families is a community-based Reading project for children and their families which aims to enable them to manage land in their own neighbourhoods for the sustainable growing of food for their own consumption, encourage healthier eating and lifestyle habits and develop understanding of the broader environmental, cultural and economic aspects of sustainable food production.

What Does Food4Families Do?

The Food4Families project gets families growing fruit and vegetables in their local communities. It does this through employing a development worker to engage local families through schools and community groups. Professional horticulturalists then work with them, together as families, to develop community growing plots and in building skills and understanding in food production to:

• equip participants with the skills to grow food crops in a sustainable way
• help participants reconnect food consumption with the process of food production
• encourage healthier eating and lifestyle habits
• facilitate learning about sustainable food production and resource use
• develop participants’ understanding of the broader cultural, environmental and economic dimensions of growing food crops
• build a local network of community based food growing projects and a broader community interest in healthy and sustainable food production and consumption.

What will Food4Families Achieve?

During the project we hope to have achieved:

1. A minimum of 15 food growing gardens, with active participation of children and parents.
2. At the end of each site's first year participants will have acquired a basic understanding of food growing principles and the ability to put these into practice independe
3. A significant measured increase in awareness of the connections with healthy eating and sustainability aspects of food growing by the end of the second year of each project site
4. Each of the community based sites and 80% of school sites will have robust organisational arrangements and engagement of staff, parents and pupils to support ongoing viability and productivity of the gardens at the end of the project
5. There will be an active network of food growing groups with web based resources and forums being actively used by participants