Search: food ( 79 Results )

Scottish policy and practice update: Sept 2025

This update is part of a regular series of rundowns of policy developments and reports on our work in Scotland, by CLES Head of Scotland, Naomi Mason.

More than “just” action plans

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to someone about CLES, our work in Scotland and our expertise in community wealth building. They made a comment about us “just” designing action plans for local authorities. I explained we did a lot more. Afterwards I paused to reflect, if they don’t know what we do, perhaps it’s time to explain? So, this blog is a little different, not so much Scotland focused, but CLES focused. If you’ve ever thought, “what do they do at CLES?”, then this blog is for you.   

Read More

Making it count: measuring local wellbeing economies

10.15-11.15am

Room: 107

Explore the rest of the programme →

This event has sold out – contact us to join the waiting list →

This session will explore how measuring wellbeing can support the development of fairer, more inclusive local economies. The session will open with a presentation from Carnegie UK, highlighting their experience in using wellbeing measures to shape policy in different national, regional and local settings across the UK.

Read More

Local, sustainable and healthy food systems: the role of anchor institutions

10.15-11.15am

Room: 104

Explore the rest of the programme →

This event has sold out – contact us to join the waiting list →

Our current food system is reliant on unsustainable practices by extractive, shareholder-oriented companies and is delivering soaring food bank use, childhood obesity and unequal health outcomes. To counter this, anchor institutions can play a key role in improving access to local, sustainable and healthy food, by using their procurement power as a lever to drive improvements in local economic, social, cultural, environmental, health and wellbeing outcomes.

Read More

CWB Summit 2025: Programme

This event has sold out – contact us to join the waiting list →

Wednesday 2 July 2025

6-8pm: pre-Summit drinks

All delegates to the Summit are invited to join the CLES team and our partners for informal pre-Summit drinks at Feel Good Club, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. Feel Good Club is a venue with a social mission – to normalise conversations around mental health and explore how success and struggle can co-exist – could there be a more perfect location to mentally prepare yourself for the networking ahead?! We’ll keep it casual and low pressure, and you’ll leave feeling excited for the next day’s discussions with like-minded folk.

Read More

Still fighting for the future of Wales

10 years of the Well-being of Future Generations Act in Wales

This is the first in a short series of blogs to mark the 10-year anniversary of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. This opening blog, from CLES’s Sarah Evans, focusses on the implementation of the Act, and considers what has worked and what have been the challenges. For those not familiar with the Act, it sets out Wales’s vision for a sustainable future and requires public bodies in Wales to consider the long-term impact of their decisions, work collaboratively with people, communities and each other, and to take action to prevent persistent challenges such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change.

When the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act was first implemented I was working at Glyndwr University and I remember being inspired about how it could shape our local and regional public services.

Read More

Backing local food with public spend

This article originally appeared on LBC Opinion.

With a global trade war looming, and the UK relying on imports for roughly 40% of its food, we are reminded – once again – of the fragility of our reliance on global supply chains. In that light, the government’s pledge that at least 50% of public sector food spending – worth £5bn annually – will go to UK suppliers seems all the more relevant. But how realistic is that promise? And what would it take to make it happen?

Even The Archers, the world’s long-running soap opera, has picked up on the issue. Farmers are struggling, squeezed by supermarket giants and rising costs. Meanwhile, more families than ever rely on food banks, childhood obesity is soaring, and the climate crisis demands urgent action to rethink how we produce and distribute food. Yet, instead of investing in local supply chains, public money continues to flow to large national suppliers.

Read More

2024: our greatest hits

As the year draws to a close, our Chief Executive, Sarah Longlands, looks back at the last twelve months of CLES’s work.

It has been a turbulent 12 months, with change – both good and bad – very much at the forefront on the domestic and international stages. Yet, despite the uncertainty of the times in which we find ourselves, at CLES we remain simultaneously pragmatic and optimistic about the power of our mission: delivering local economic change. As we wrote in our general election manifesto – Our Local Economic Future – change may be dreamt of by aspiring national leaders, but it is both delivered and felt in communities.
“the growth of ideas, of confidence, of time and of resources”
But this kind of change doesn’t happen by invoking economic growth as the key to every lock. The kind of change that our communities need comes instead from the growth of ideas, of confidence, of time and of resources: to challenge preconceptions and tired economic assumptions, to think differently and with ambition.

Read More

Much to learn from Celtic wealth building

This article originally appeared in the MJ.

CLES’s most recent community wealth building conversation event, chaired by Huw Thomas, Director of Finance at Hywel Dda University, introduced the idea of “small country governments” and the pragmatic role that our Celtic governments are playing in tackling key challenges using community wealth building approaches. They are well placed to do this, the discussion concluded, because they are embedded in their places. But achieving public sector reform must go hand in hand with investing in the development of thriving local communities.

The discussion brought together expertise from across the Celtic nations, including Miriam Brett, Co-Director of Future Economy Scotland, Rhiannon Hardiman, the Policy Lead for Climate, Nature, Economy & Food Future at the Generations Commissioner for Wales, Mary McManus, Regional Manager for Living Wage Northern Ireland and Liam Quinn, Chief Executive of the Waterford Area Partnership.

Read More

Powering up our rural communities

This article originally appeared in The Municipal Journal.

Imagine living in a place which owned its own wind turbine. Where the village shop was owned and run by local people. Where a network of local social enterprises collaborated to bid for contracts from the public sector. Where all residents felt empowered to participate in developing an action plan for their community. Where the community owned the land their houses were built on, made sure new homes were affordable and were not sold as second homes. Is this a fantasy village? Possibly. But the fact is that rural places across the UK are already delivering all of these constituent parts. The next – and crucial – step is bringing them together.

The second of CLES’s Community Wealth Building Conversations, last week, focused on how the approach works in a rural context. One of the challenges frequently levelled at the community wealth building movement is that it is an urban-centric and -focused method of economic development. When the vast majority of the UK is rural, ensuring that community wealth building can be delivered across all our regions is important. We know that many of the more visible challenges facing urban communities – like poverty – can be masked in rural places. Not only this, but often the lack of rural infrastructure can compound poverty and exacerbate the challenges facing people in their places.
“opportunities […] can be present as well ”
Our panellists at the event – Neil McInroy, Global Lead for Community Wealth Building for The Democracy Collaborative, and Cllr Lisa Brown, Deputy Leader for Cumberland Council – opened the proceedings with provocations highlighting some of the challenges our rural places face. Transport, housing and service delivery all got a mention, but they also noted the opportunities that can be present as well – in energy, food and tackling issues like climate change. Ownership of land was also noted as a key theme as the inequality of who does and who doesn’t own the ground we stand on clearly demonstrates the extraction of wealth from our places.

Read More