Our Key Principles

Growing Communities is working to create a more sustainable and resilient food system to meet the challenges posed by climate change and resource depletion.

Our key principles help us define what we mean by 'sustainable and resilient' as well as helping us to show how our community-led trading projects are creating real change. So, at Growing Communities we aim to apply all the principles to our work all the time! In practice, this is easier said than done and involves weighing up a number of different considerations and making trade-offs where necessary; reflected in the Box Scheme buying policy, Farmers' Market rules and Urban Market Garden management plans.

Each of the principles is necessary but not sufficient by themselves - they all need to be applied. And the principles are a work in progress:  we continue to refine and develop them as our understanding develops and the context in which we work changes - we monitor all our work against these principles to see what impact we are actually having. 

We rely on common sense, integrity and feedback from the community to enable us to balance these principles while continuing to live in the real world.

In summary, the food traded should be:

* Farmed and produced ecologically
* As local as practicable
* Seasonal
* Mainly plant based
* Mainly fresh and minimally processed
* From appropriately scaled operations (which gravitate to the small rather than to the large scale)

And the system as a whole needs to:

* Support fair trade
* Involve environmentally friendly and low-carbon resource use
* Promote knowledge
* Strive to be economically viable and independent
* Foster community
* Be transparent and promote trust throughout the food chain

If you want to find out more about our Key Principles then look at the Key Principles pages on our Start-Up website.