A combination of innovative vegan catering, Mary Clear’s talk on Incredible Edible, the cohort’s own introductions to each other and icebreaker exercises brought together our cohort in a fun, casual and inspirational tone.

The cohort divided into five groups to develop ideas in the problem areas identified by the Feeding the City brief. This yielded detailed proposals on Education, Food Waste, Incentivising Local Production, Redistributing Surpluses and Teaching to Cook.

Our target was to have one or two ideas submitted by Bradford to the national programme, but ultimately, five ideas (not those above) were submitted by participants and one (Beat and the Pulse) was shortlisted for the programme. The most significant outcome of the evening was a broad desire to keep the conversations going and form a group and regular meetup for foodpreneurs in the region, centred in Bradford.

In the long term, we also speculated about a possible ‘coworking for foodpreneurs’ offer, with shared food preparation facilities and the development of a food district or food scene as Bradford’s unique offer. It’s likely now that this community will be developed by one of our cohort, we believe that 50-60 members at a minimum can be recruited on launch.

A number of Bradford organisations have come together as a consortium to represent the city in the Local Access Programme. Each bring a unique perspective and set of skills to the group, forming a diverse, agile and innovative team representing the city’s brightest communities.

Criteria

For the social enterprise ecosystem and the community and voluntary sectors, we know this will be a vital development.

On this page you can follow our participation in the Local Access Programme, learn about the composition of the team and partner organisations, download and read our publications, gain an understanding of the timeline of events and get in touch for further information.

What you receive

This programmes is supported by: