Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People (H3): Developing partnerships with community organisations

Promoting dietary fibre consumption in people from disadvantaged communities
Fruits, vegetables and grains of a healthy fibre diet

Overview

This part of the H3 project focuses 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, are working closely with a surplus food charity (FareShare Yorkshire) and developing 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.
  • Developing partnerships with grassroots charities in Leeds to distribute slow cookers to households in disadvantaged communities, offering a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to cook food.

Relationships

The research team highlighted the importance of mutual benefits for all partners when working together:
"…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)
In-person meetings and social interactions outside of the project have been valuable for the development of relationships. 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.

Knowledge

Researchers recognised the knowledge and expertise of those working within community organisations, and 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)
 

Find out more about this project

Related references

Boyle, N. B., K. Adolphus, S. J. Caton, F. C. Croden, L. Dye, A. Glass, K. Halliwell, G. L. Hansen, L. Holm, P. Jackson, F. Makinwa, B. Stærk, and N. Wilkinson (2023), 'Increasing fibre intake in the UK: lessons from the Danish Whole Grain Partnership', British Journal of Nutrition: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007114523002106
Jackson, P., D. Cameron, S. Rolfe, L. V. Dicks, J. Leake, S. Caton, L. Dye, W. Young, S. Choudhary, D. Evans, K. Adolphus, and N. Boyle (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