Shaping Places for Healthier Lives: Solving food insecurity in South West Shropshire

What is food insecurity?

• Food insecurity is when you do not have enough affordable and nutritious food to help you live healthily.
• We know that some people in rural communities can face additional challenges in getting food locally and need to travel to shop. This adds to any financial difficulties they may already experience as a result of lower wages and higher energy bills.

The Shaping Places project aims to understand the reasons behind food insecurity and your evidence may help to secure additional funding over the next 3 years to deliver programmes to relieve food poverty in South West Shropshire.

More about the project

Project Team: Shropshire Council – Public Health, Healthwatch Shropshire, Shropshire Food Poverty Alliance, Citizens Advice Shropshire. We report to the Shropshire Health and Wellbeing Board.

Shropshire Council and its partners have been successful in securing ‘Shaping Places for Healthier Lives’ grant funding from the Local Government Association (LGA) supported by Health Foundation. ‘Shaping Places’ focuses on reducing health inequalities by addressing a complex problem. In our case, this is food insecurity.

We are focussing on South-West Shropshire at this stage (the ‘Discovery’ phase), which includes the towns of Bishops Castle, Ludlow, Craven Arms, Church Stretton and their surrounding villages and hamlets.

We will use this grant to work alongside communities in South-West Shropshire to better understand the reasons causing food insecurity and the impact it has on people’s lives. Our findings will inform our final application to the LGA for significant additional funding over the next 3 years. If we are successful, this will then enable us to meaningfully co-produce and deliver sustainable action to address food insecurity with our rural communities across the whole of Shropshire.

What do we want to find out?

• the extent to which our South-West Shropshire communities face challenges in accessing affordable, nutritious food;
• key reasons for food insecurity in rural communities in South-West Shropshire; and
• opportunities to enable and support long term food security.

We will do this by:

• engaging with communities and organisations within South-West Shropshire including Food Banks
• engaging with and listening to people with lived experience of food insecurity, through sensitive and confidential discussions
• publishing an on-line survey for everyone who wishes to contribute, to complete
• engaging with the Health and Care sector

We will develop and publish recommendations that:

• optimise opportunities to address food insecurity
• increase strategic and operational awareness of local challenges and opportunities
• strengthen our potential to deliver community-informed work if we are successful with final funding.