03 November 2025
Our last webinar, “Walsall: A Local Food System Story”, explored how Food for Life and Walsall Council are working with local partners to build food system resilience through collaboration, local leadership, and connected actions that add up to something bigger.
When Food for Life partners with a Local Authority or place-based partner, we seek to strengthen and connect what already exists, rather than introducing something shiny and new. We appreciate the challenges that communities face in accessing and normalising healthy and sustainable food environments and we value community knowledge as a vital catalyst for meaningful, sustained solutions to those challenges.
We want to work with local partners as the drivers of long-term change – although we appreciate how stretched and under-resourced they can be.
So what did this look like in Walsall? In a separate post, we’ve explored the way we approached our interventions – as co-designed iterations of programmes that have worked elsewhere.
Here, we want to profile the partners that have been vital to our work with Walsall and celebrate the power of relationships in seeding long term change.
The team in Walsall has been keen to find the partners that have both a shared vision for healthier and more sustainable meals and the potential to reach lots of people. Walsall College met both criteria: the College itself serves 2475 meals per day and the onsite nursery, Little Professors, has 79 under 5s on roll according to their 2023 Ofsted report.
Our Sustainable Catering team worked with Paul Ingleby (Catering Manager, Walsall College) and Dawn Smith (Little Professor’s Manager / Cook) to map shared ambitions and how we could collaborate with them. Their insight led to us mapping where we could work together, in order to impact day-to-day food environments at Walsall College and the future ambitions of the students. Together we are:
Supporting Little Professors Nursery to embed a healthy food environment through our Food for Life Early Years award
Working with Paul to explore best opportunities to improve food provision across college sites including The Lyttleton Restaurant (the college’s public facing college and bar)
Using our Cool Food Pro environmental calculator tool to support Paul to make informed changes to menu reformulation; engaging future caterers in sustainable food education workshops
Future Foodies – Food for Life team support for this summer workshop series for young people aged 14-16, building dispersed food literacy.
As a result of this growing engagement with food leadership (and a My Food Communities grant, sponsored by Denton’s), Aaina has developed their Recipe Exchange programme, in partnership with Caldmore Community Garden. The recipe exchange brings together 12 ladies, predominantly from South Asian and Eastern European backgrounds, to share and cook traditional recipes from their cultures.
Aaina’s food leadership experience is now feeding into the Walsall Food Partnership – Aaina staff sit on the steering group and their rooted experience is helping to shape the direction of the Walsall Food Plan.
Walsall Housing Group’s (WHG) participation in Walsall’s My Food Community leadership programme has supported their Social Justice 2025-2030 Strategy. Their aims to tackle economic inequality, strengthen communities and create opportunities are all strengthened through improving food literacy and food access. Their strategic priority to have a strong and influential voice has made them an important contributor to the Walsall Food Summit (2024) and the Walsall Food Partnership.
Two WHG staff members participated in My Food Community and the grants they received as a part of the programme funded the delivery of slow cooker workshops and budget cook along sessions with Tik Tok star ‘Meals with Mitch’.
For us, one of the real measures of success in a place-based programme is when local partners help to shape and build the work – it means that our frameworks and campaigns are made meaningful to local contexts and increases the likelihood that the impact of the work can be sustained when our funding comes to an end.
Our collaboration in Walsall has benefitted from the time and space to articulate a shared ambition for the local food system, and co-design of some of the building blocks the communities of Walsall need to get there.
The Soil Association’s strategy to 2030 prioritises Joining Forces for Positive Change – we know that our bold ambitions for a more healthy, more resilient food system are only possible through collaboration, layering our experience and expertise with local and national partners. Our local partners leaders and networks in Walsall are exemplars of this approach – and their commitment to the emerging Walsall Food Partnership is a powerful statement of distributed leadership, relationship-building and shared learning.
If you would like to find out more about our work in Walsall, read our latest impact report.