Not one but two inner-city food-growing projects have been shortlisted for a national award by Local Food, a £59.8m scheme that distributes grants from the Big Lottery Fund to projects helping to make locally grown food accessible and affordable to communities.

The Growing Kitchen Community project in Hackney will now compete against two other projects from across England for the chance to be named winners of the Small Grants category in the Local Food Recognition Awards 2013.  Meanwhile, the Patchwork Farm project, also in Hackney, is in with a chance to be named winner of the Local Food Enterprise category, and will also compete against two other projects for the accolade.

In 2009, the Growing Kitchen project, run by Fourthland, received £10,000 in funding from Local Food to enable residents to take ownership of and manage their community food growing site at the Wenlock Barn estate, helping to reduce reliability on outside agencies.  This included empowering residents by facilitating the set-up and running of a structured garden resident Management Committee, and increasing food-growing, horticulture and practical skills on the estate by providing technical workshops.  The Growing Kitchen project involves over 100 residents, including those who enjoy the garden and those tending to the plots on a daily basis.

People from 12 countries the world over take part, and alongside the growing of many different varieties of vegetables and herbs, the garden has influenced governance and planting on the estate as a whole, working as a catalyst for other growing initiatives including an estate orchard and a foraging garden and benefiting the estate as a whole.  In a separate initiative, volunteers at the project were presented with a trophy last week by the England Director of the Big Lottery Fund after being named London Local Food Heroes in a public vote.

Meanwhile, in 2010, the Patchwork Farm project, run by Growing Communities, received £124,643 to create a series of organic growing sites within Hackney, and to offer training and business start-ups in organic urban food growing to local people with a view to them going on to generate their own income selling produce to the Growing Communities Box Scheme and local shops and cafés.  The project has so far created 9 new food growing sites out of disused land in Hackney, selling fresh produce and training 14 new food growers – many of whom were either unemployed or underemployed, including 10 who are now self-employed.  As well as providing fresh, healthy produce to several thousand people in Hackney , the project also offers volunteering opportunities. 

The Local Food Recognition Awards are an opportunity to recognise, reward and celebrate some of the hundreds of outstanding community projects that Local Food has funded since the programme opened in 2008. 

All 500 Local Food projects were invited to enter the Awards in 4 categories – Small Grants, Community Food Growing, Education and Learning, and Enterprise.  Shortlisted projects will be judged by an external panel in September, and the winners in each category will be unveiled in November at an event at The Lowry in Manchester. 

Mark Wheddon, Local Food Programme Manager, said: “The Local Food Recognition Awards seek to celebrate the most outstanding community projects delivered with the help of Local Food funding.  All our projects have made a positive and lasting impact in the communities in which they are based, helping local people in all manner of different ways to access, grow, prepare and understand the benefits of fresh, healthy food, so to be shortlisted for an Award is a tremendous achievement. Many Local Food projects have gone beyond the original aims of the programme and are having much wider impacts in their communities, so our judges have a difficult but exciting task ahead in choosing the winners.”