The Food Ethics Council recently facilitated a large consultation of charities, social enterprises, networks and co-operatives working on issues in the food system. They gathered responses from around 130 organisations across the UK (including us) and have produced a very readable and useful report on the results:

Click here to read the Food Issues Census 2024-2025

Click here to read the two page summary of the Food Issues Census

Some quotes from the report really resonate with us, and affirm why we do what we do…

The need to transform food systems has never been more pressing. Issues such as hunger, public health crises, environmental degradation, economic instability, and social inequality are escalating, demanding more purposeful action from those shaping the future of food and farming.

Simply put: change food, change the nation, change the world. Food is one of the most powerful levers for tackling key social and environmental challenges. Prioritise food—invest in transforming food systems.

Support community-led initiatives and the infrastructure that sustains them. Wicked problems can not be solved top-down. Strengthening local food systems and community leadership can address both food insecurity and sustainability. This requires investment in diverse, inclusive community-led initiatives, and improving access to land for new entrant farmers and growers, especially those from marginalised groups. It also requires funding for effective, skilful facilitators and for anchor organisations and alliances that provide vital networks and resources.

There is a lot else in the report that resonates too – particularly about funding. At Lauriston Farm, we have been fortunate to receive substantial core funding from an Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Sponsorship from Britel Fund Trustees Limited, through a fund managed by Hermes Investment Management Limited. This is the type of funding this report calls for: unrestricted, substantial, multi-year funding for a community-led initiative. Having this funding enabled us to start a farm from scratch and do as much as we’ve been able to do in just a few years.

We know from social impact research that the farm delivers huge social returns on investment. The organisation One Stone carried out research on our work in 2023, which calculated that the project adds the equivalent of at least £5 worth of value for every £1 invested. This value includes the benefit to the environment in improved and networked habitat creation, and to people in improved sense of belonging, agency, and health and wellbeing. If other projects received similar types of funding, those benefits would spread and multiply many times more.