Lambeth Mutual Aid Network Updates

Lambeth Mutual Aid received £500 from the Lambeth Forum Network via Myatt’s Field Forum and Food Five Ways (a project of the Lambeth Food Partnership)! We were so happy to hear the money helped with a great event around food – check out their story below:

Lambeth Mutual Aid sought funding to help support an event around food as part of our School of Solidarity series of termly events, aimed at embodying the spirit of mutual aid through collective learning and skill-sharing.

We aimed to use the even to discuss the following questions: how can we create a more local, resilient and people and environment focused food system that moves away from transactional and exploitative relationships? How can we eradicate food insecurity and promote a healthier, more holistic relationship with food that contributes to mental and physical wellbeing while being affordable and accessible? We planned for the event to have a mix of workshops, stalls, talks and practical activities facilitated by local organisations working around the areas of food waste and redistribution, communal food growing, food education, plant-based and other forms of nutritional, locally sourced food cooking, etc.

We wanted the event to provide some tangible, immediate outcomes, in addition to more long-term discussions, partnerships and follow-up events. We planned for two hands-on activities: sharing recipes for a cookbook and the mapping activity previously mentioned. We didn’t have enough time to dedicate to the cook book activity so we only got two submissions on the day, and another one by email a few days later. We are still keen to put something together and one LMA member who has a lot of experience with making zines and overall designs has taken on the task to collect more from our members/subscribers and put together a zine so we are hoping to still be able to get something out of it.

The mapping exercise was quite successful in not only identifying places where people can access food -including some places that are not advertised in directories or online- but also generating very important conversations. Again, we would have benefitted from dedicating more time to this. We would love for the physical map to be displayed somewhere (once we have cleaned up the post-it notes) but unfortunately LMA doesn’t have a permanent physical space. We are now working on digitising it and want to share it on our website, making sure it complements existing great resources such as the Lambeth Larder directory.

The food part was a very good addition to the event, first by giving another opportunity for people to get involved in the event if they didn’t feel comfortable attending the event or were not available then. Some people did attend both days, some only the cooking or the event so it was nice to provide these options. Secondly, it contributed to creating a welcoming and relaxed atmosphere of eating and sharing food while also discussing the topic at hand (literally!). Some attendees signed up to be kept in touch with what would happen next. We are currently writing up a blog post and an item for our next newsletter about the event and next steps. In our debrief meeting, we discussed building a pattern of main event – follow up drop in session for each of the topics we tackle, so we are aiming to have such a follow up early August, space availability depending.

We are glad that the event enabled a handful of people to participate actively in the organising and running of the event beyond what the grant covered and for a couple to being actively involved with LMA now and we hope to be able to scale this up in the future so we can reach even more.

We want to thank again the funders and host for the fund, not only for supporting the event financially but also with hosting the grant and providing ongoing support with the planning and evaluation. As a grassroots organisation, it has enabled us to go beyond our usual remit while still implementing our principles. We hope that there will be further opportunities to collaborate!