Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People (H3): Developing partnerships with community organisations
Promoting dietary fibre consumption in people from disadvantaged communities
Overview
This part of the H3 project focused on partnerships with community organisations to increase dietary fibre intake, particularly in people from low socioeconomic groups and disadvantaged communities.
People involved
A multidisciplinary research team, including researchers from nutrition, psychology, and food policy, worked closely with a surplus food charity (FareShare Yorkshire) and developed partnerships with community organisations.
Key project activities
Collaboration with FareShare Yorkshire
- Determining the availability and sources of fibre in a year's surplus food redistributed within Leeds to breakfast clubs, food pantries, and other local charities supporting people living with food insecurity.
- Supporting the development of capacity to process excess surplus food. The research team will provide expertise from food science, and access to university equipment for testing cooking and preservation processes.
- Supporting the creation of social eating spaces by sharing findings from existing research about what works well in building cohesion and assisting with the evaluation of impacts.
Partnerships with community organisations
- Co-designing and evaluating social cooking activities that aim to use food as a shared social anchor to increase cooking confidence and promote fibre intake, including:
- A group in Leeds delivering intergenerational cooking courses from a mobile kitchen.
- Cracking Good Food in Manchester to design and evaluate a six-week course for food insecure populations, monitoring the impact on fibre intake. H3 also partnered with Cracking Good Food to produce a booklet of low-cost, low-fuel, high fibre recipes: 'Power Up the Flavour'
- Developing partnerships with grassroots charities in Leeds to distribute slow cookers and air fryers to households in disadvantaged communities, offering a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to cook food. Building on this collaboration, the group supported attendance at Jamie Oliver training courses, co-designed cooking classes and produced a 'Lentils for Life' cookbook of affordable and nutritious recipes. Recipes were taste-tested by members of the public in sessions at Leeds Cookery School.
- Partnering with local social enterprises – including community shops and larders – to deliver healthy-eating events focused on promoting fibre-rich foods (lentils, chickpeas and beans). These events drew strong public interest and received enthusiastic feedback, with many participants expressing intentions to incorporate these ingredients into their regular meals.
Co-production principles
Relationships
The research team has fostered relationships with a diverse range of community organisations in Leeds and Sheffield, actively engaging with members of the public, and involving students. Taking part in community events, science and food festivals, as well as face-to-face meetings and informal gatherings outside of the project have been valuable for building relationships and making new connections. For example, a member of the research team has enjoyed being a volunteer in a local food pantry outside of the project, and further research ideas have emerged from these interactions.
"Getting to know people has been the key to it." (Project team, H3)
The research team highlighted the importance of maintaining contact with partners, following up to share findings, and identifying mutual benefits for all collaborators:
"…there's got to be a bit of give and take, whether that's the time or whether it's access to facilities or kind of just to show we're not just there to just to measure and go." (Researcher, H3)
Knowledge
Researchers recognised the creativity, resilience and expertise of those working within food pantries and larders, their understanding of the local community and how to best promote engagement in events. The research team noted the importance of building research on this expertise rather than prescribing what should be done:
"We're not there as the experts in any sense. And I think it's just showing interest in what people do because I'm interested in what people do… and their methods of working… and I think it's learning from them." (Researcher, H3)
Acknowledging the contributions from staff at community organisations and service users was considered essential, particularly in the development of practical outputs such as jointly created recipe books:
"I've been giving them some recognition for their involvement, and you know how they've helped. They've helped create something… they've been a massive part of it..." (Researcher, H3)
Inclusivity
Despite close collaboration with community organisations, the research team reflected on the challenges with reaching isolated members of the community:
"People who are the easiest to reach are connected to charities and might not represent the most hidden and isolated cases… it's sort of being aware that the people that you're reaching, there's another level below that." (Researcher, H3)
Find out more about this project
Related references
Boyle, N. B., Adolphus, K., Caton, S. J., Croden, F. C., Dye, L., Glass, A., Halliwell, K., Hansen, G. L., Holm, L., Jackson, P., Makinwa, F., Stærk, B. and Wilkinson, N. (2023), 'Increasing fibre intake in the UK: lessons from the Danish Whole Grain Partnership', British Journal of Nutrition, 131: 672-685. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007114523002106
Cracking Good Food (2024) University research & collaborations. Accessed 22 April 2025. https://crackinggoodfood.org/community/university-research-collaborations/
Cracking Good Food. Power Up the Flavour. https://crackinggoodfood.org/community/power-up-the-flavour/
Croden, F. Lentils for Life Cookbook. https://h3.ac.uk/lentils-for-life-cookbook-3/
Jackson, P., Cameron, D., Rolfe, S., Dicks, L. V., Leake, J., Caton, S., Dye, L., Young, W., Choudhary, S., Evans, D.,Adolphus, K. and Boyle, N. (2021), 'Healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people: An outline of the H3 project', Nutrition Bulletin, 46: 497–505. http://doi.org/10.1111/nbu.12531
