Incredible Edible Lambeth’s AGM was held on Thursday 12th October at the Garden Museum, and featured the Blooming Lambeth awards, sponsored by Lambeth Council and Engie.
Incredible Edible Lambeth is all about shouting out about all this great community activity that is going on in community gardens and kitchens, and looking for ways to ensure that all our efforts have a real impact in making the borough a better place to live, work and play.
We are able to report at the AGM that over the last year Incredible Edible Lambeth has been involved in some key projects
- We were commissioned to curate a series of activities for the Chelsea Fringe by Nine Elms London. This took us outside of Lambeth into Wandsworth, although Nine Elms does straddle both boroughs.
- We ran the CREATE – Start Your Own Food Business programme in Loughborough Junction and Gipsy Hill
- We have been involved in a big piece of work with LEAP – the 10 year £30m lottery programme in four of Lambeth’s most deprived wards, that aims to improve outcomes for children born into poverty. We have been advising on how community organisations and individuals can develop projects to encourage healthy eating and physical activity. We expect this work to continue and expand, and to be able to share learning.
- And of course we were commissioned to run the Blooming Lambeth awards and that’s been a great way to bring people together and share what is going in our gardens.
We have also been contributing to a big piece of work to map all the food work that is going on in Lambeth and how we compare with other boroughs/areas of the country through the Lambeth Food Partnership. We are the experts in understanding the food system locally and are increasingly in a much better position to identify what actions to take to be effective in terms of improving access to good food in the borough.
A major focus of our volunteer effort this year has been networking with the health sector to increase the visibility of community gardens and kitchens, and the work we do. NHS structures are constantly being reorganised and like much of the statutory sector ‘health’ organisations are looking at how they can work better with communities. Progress is slow but it is good for the food activist community to be a part of that networking so if you would like to get involved in that please let me know. Specifically Lambeth has been split into three local care network (LCN) areas and each area has a community forum, so it would be good if we could sit on all of those. I would also urge every community garden to get involved with their local GP patient participation group (PPG) and tell them about your garden.
Going forward this year we would like to focus heavily on our map – to ease the networking and signposting to community food projects. To facilitate this we will maintain our loose network (twitter/facebook etc), but we are also launching a more formal membership scheme. This will also enable better cooperation between organisations and allow us to represent community gardens at meetings eg with the health sector. There are two kinds of membership – for groups and for individuals. Membership is FREE. Details are with Janie – please note that if you sign up as a group you also get free membership of the Garden Museum..
You can sign your gardening group up,or yourself as a supporting individual here. Only groups who become members will be added to the map.
One of our directors stood down completely and that was our former chair Ann Bodkin. The ‘old’ directors thanked Ann for leading us for 6 years with a big bunch of flowers. We appointed four new directors:
- Dorothy Allen
- Janie Bickersteth
- Monica Ganan
- Orsetta Hosquet
We look forward to working with you over the coming year.