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Working together: recipes for success

Reports | Published  14 November 2022

Eating Better launches a new guide to strengthening civil society collaboration, working towards healthy and sustainable dietary change based on its 9 years experience and insights from across alliances in other European countries. 

Eating Better came together with 25 change-makers from across Europe for three days in September to plan how we can all move the Health Food Healthy Planet initiative forward. 

Healthy Food Healthy Planet is an emerging Pan-European movement uniting civil society organisations and funders so that healthy, just and sustainable food environments become the norm and harmful animal agriculture ends.

During these three days, it became even clearer to us that collaborations are greater than the sum of their parts. Our ambition for a better food environment, where sustainable diets are accessible and affordable, is too complex to be tackled alone. The transformations we're working towards need collaborations that span multiple expertise areas and geographical boundaries, where a vast range of groups and people can share their knowledge.

We decided to learn more about what makes successful collaborations, and spoke to a diverse range of organisations and individuals across Europe who are also working on healthy and sustainable diets. 

What we learnt about successful coalition-building fell broadly into six key areas, including how to find support, create a clear vision and objectives and an annual work plan, and how to keep momentum. 

In the spirit of collaboration, we’ve decided to share our learnings, which we’ve laid out in a new report, Recipes For Success. The guide showcases national and local examples of collaborations, and gives insight into the types of decisions and challenges coalitions face throughout their lifespan. 

It covers six key areas, including  communications, vision and strategy, trust and relationships, leadership and culture, funding and resourcing and governance and management structures.

We hope Recipes For Success will provide helpful and practical advice for anyone considering collaborating for dietary change, and show just how crucial collaboration is to achieving impactful change. 

Not only have we produced guidance for others, we’re also thinking about how to strengthen  Eating Better and build a more diverse alliance of voices. We’re currently building a network of support to propel Healthy Food Healthy Planet and build stronger collaborations. 

Our food system is currently working against us, and we must address this enormous challenge together so we can weave an unstoppable European movement that harnesses the power of diversity and difference.