The Glenkens Food Hub – Propagate
The Glenkens Food Hub was shortlisted for the Social Innovation Challenge. They aim to create a producer-led, community-involved food hub, addressing the challenge of availability and accessibility of locally produced food.
Propagate is a worker-led collective specialising in local, community, and sustainable food projects. They work primarily across Central and Southwest Scotland. Through a range of projects, they co-create better food systems within Food Education, Food Justice, Food Economy, Food Networks, and Food Policy.
The collective created a Local Food Scoping Study in July 2020 in response to the Glenkens Community Action Plan which highlighted the need to create a more resilient local food system through production, distribution, and learning.
Propagate found that in the Glenkens community, they needed to overcome the barriers of cost, distance, time, and availability of local products.
The collective’s vision is to grow the Local Food Hub in the Glenkens to build community wealth. They applied to the Social Innovation Challenge with this vision in mind.
They want to create a thriving, producer-led but community-involved, sustainable and local supply chain. Their ambitions for the Food Hub include addressing the challenge of availability and accessibility of locally produced food. They will tackle this by cooperating and combining resources on a shared online platform to offer a wide range of products. Produce will be delivered within a defined radius, partnering where possible with the local community transport company using electric vehicles.
They want their communities to have fair access to good food, for food to be produced ecologically and sustainably, and for their producers to have resilient rural livelihoods. By ‘good food’ they mean food that has been produced in a way that is good for the environment and ecosystems; where the people who have produced it are respected and paid fairly, and where possible it is affordable and accessible to all.
The Food Hub is currently well into its eight-month pilot phase, and they continue to move forward with their plans for developing the frequency of order days and additional socially beneficial projects to support the local community.