Our approach to food insecurity is based on the human right to food - everyone should have a dignified access to food that is adequate, accessible and available.
As an immediate response we deliver the Dignity in Practice programme which brings together organisations across Scotland working to implement dignity in their approaches to food insecurity. What dignity looks like is informed by the 5 Dignity Principles. These principles were co-developed with people with lived experience of food insecurity.
We believe everyone should have sufficient wages and social security to buy food of their choice. Working within the existing system, we support and promote the Scottish Government's 'cash-first' approach which is about maximising people's income wherever possible.
But we know cash alone is not enough - we need better infrastructure to make it easier for all of us to eat well. To make this a reality, we are advocating for creation of Public Diners - state supported restaurants. They existed in the UK between 1940s-70s, and are part of public infrastructure in other countries from Poland to Singapore. Our governments have built infrastructure of different types to deliver on other rights: education, housing, health, information to name but a few. From public libraries, parks and leisure centres, to housing and the NHS, the state invests in and maintains institutions and systems for our collective benefit. Now it's time they deliver this for the right to food.
Origins of the participation panel: exploring the motivation behind Its creation
The Good Food Nation (GFN) Act aims to make Scotland a place " where people from every walk of life take pride and pleasure in, and benefit from, the food they produce, buy, cook, serve, and eat each day.” As part of this, local authorities and health boards have been tasked with making food plans. These plans will be about how we can realise GFN ambitions at a local level.
We believe that if we really want to make the GFN happen it needs to be co-developed with people. However, we know that it can be challenging to reach out to and involve people in a way that feels meaningful to them. This is why we decided to create the Meaningful Participation panel. This panel is made up of 12 experts by experience of participation. This means that panellists have been involved in decision-making processes - whether in their schools, parent-teacher groups, community centres, activist groups, local councils or at a national level and they have ideas about how to improve participation processes. The group has a diverse set of lived experiences including being single parents, in the asylum process, migrants and LGBTQI+ . Councils, health boards and other organisations wishing to implement meaningful participation can hire the panel to support their design and delivery of decision-making processes.
The panels Impact on the organisation's mission and work
Convening this panel has allowed us to learn how to improve our own practices to ensure we are doing co-design in the best way possible. Simply setting up the panel and establishing open lines of communication for feedback has enabled us to model meaningful participation in the way that we work.
The panel has also advised on specific projects like on Scottish Food Coalition's (SFC) workshop designed to get more people to respond to the consultation on the Good Food Nation plan. Advice given by the panel helped the SFC tweak the design so that it enabled people participating to talk about the things that most mattered to them. The panel also advised on materials aimed at recruiting people with lived experience of food insecurity to be involved in a dialogue with policy makers. The panel suggested changes like ensuring the photographs were not only of people in 'office-like' settings, being more explicit on expectations of time commitment and payment and suggesting different ways in which people could reach out to find out more information. We managed to recruit 32 people.
As the development of the local food plans has been delayed, the panel will now turn to advising on how to co-design Public Diners with communities of place. They are also open to being hired by other organisations aiming to improve the ways in which they do participation!
