Growing area created with help from Community Payback Team

Nornir’s pioneering pathways to employment and food security project is empowering people on probation to become essential workers in Greater Manchester’s food economy. Through community growing spaces and partnerships with affordable food retailers, Nornir is creating sustainable solutions to food poverty while opening up routes back into work for ex-offenders.

See the link below for more details: 

https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/what-we-do/economy/foundational-economy-innovation-fund/how-nornir-is-reshaping-food-support-and-rehabilitation-in-greater-manchester/

Oyster mushrooms growing

In partnership with Fungall CIC we have been pushing ahead with the growing of mushrooms and then using them in cooking as a substitute for cheap imported and unhealthy meat.

This has been helped by the Community Payback teams helping to construct the growing containers and kitting out the insides. The first harvests of mushrooms have been made and some of this has been used in community cooking. But, similar to the food grown in the community garden. There has been a big demand for the mushrooms from the guys working on the Community Payback Scheme - many of whom are in food poverty themselves and so beneficiaries of the project.

Donating the produce to the guys who are actually growing it seems like such a powerful and inclusive step forward.

We have been looking into trying to make the process more formal, for example certification for growing mushrooms. At the moment we suspect the informal approach the supervisors have adopted will be just as effective, if not more so.

What was also impressive is that the guys were knocked out about how they could do it themselves 'better and cheaper than KFC' one of them suggested.  We feel that this is “empowerment in action” and although unexpected needs to be emphasised as a really positive outcome. It’s something we will certainly want to develop more in the future.

Locally grown food

We have continued to develop and support the growing of food by local organisations. The growing at Marple supported by the Community Payback team is now fully sustainable and producing ready meals on a small scale for food poverty projects. Therefore, we have moved on to develop the work further at Forever Fields.  However, the plan to grow local food and use it to cook ready meals for food poverty projects has been modified because of an unexpected demand for the produce from an unexpected source.

As the food has grown throughout the summer we have been working more with the guys working on the gardens from the Community Payback schemes, many of whom are in food poverty themselves. We have encouraged them to take produce home at the end of the day’s activity and to prepare their own nutritious ready meals for themselves at home. We have regular queues outside the poly tunnel and container for free tomatoes and mushrooms.

This has also been enhanced by showing the guys how to prepare and cook the food at their own homes. We have even had one of the CP placements boasting about making a “new”recipe he invented at home using the garden produce.  

We have been really pleased that the Placements clearly understood and learned about good food during their time on cp with us and how they can make their own much better (and cheaper) food than the “shit” they normally eat.

So we now have a new plan in place and that is to use good local grown food to create a menu that will appeal to lots of people. Vegan Fried Chicken and Chips, Vegan Jerk Fried Chicken etc. This will be seasoned and battered strips of oyster mushroom fried in an air fryer - 'strips, chips and peas' as one of the group called it.

Watch this space!

Photo of the tables ready for the warm hub afternoon

We have continued to develop the work we started with ready meals production being cooked by volunteers (including asylum seekers) and CP placements.

We realised that there was an existing warm hub at Chorlton Central Church. The Warm Hub cooked meals for people in food poverty on a Thursday afternoon. In order to maintain this valuable activity we have:

a)      Added our cooking sessions to the provision so that it can become more sustainable. Our chef is cooking up to 40 for ready meals that have been donated to the homeless.

b)      Food is then prepared for the warm hub which attracts up to 40 adults. This has been so successful that the adults have started to bring their children and we can have up to 20 children at each session.

c)      In order to make the sessions more sustainable we have also set in place food collections from Fairshare Manchester. The food is collected each week for a mall fee and this has massively reduced the costs of running the warm hub and ready meals.

d)      There is a break over the summer but when cooking starts again in September we are planning a separate activity for the children as a craft club with food on a Thursday. Also moving the adults warm hub and ready meal production to Wednesday.

Because there will be no children at the Wednesday warm hub we can once again start to use CP placements in the kitchen

Community Payback Pathways to Healthy Eating and Food Security

When we started out on this project, we had the relatively modest ambition of enlisting people on probation subject to an Unpaid Work Requirement of a Community Order (Community Payback) to produce healthy ready meals for community-run pantries as a way of paying back to the local communities against whom they had offended

What we didn’t realise at the time,  was the significance of working with Community Payback to do this and its  implications for strengthening community power in the foundational economy, not only of food, but also in the wider foundational economy of health, social care and community safety.

Community Payback strengthening the foundational economy

The foundational economy is that sector of the economy which supplies the everyday but essential goods and services that make life worth living in local communities and ensure their effective functioning. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) Foundational Economy Innovation Fund pointed out to us that what we were doing was not only producing healthy ready meals for donation to  community-run pantries, but it was also strengthening  the foundational economy in food by opening up access to affordable healthy food for everyone irrespective of their income level.

What’s more, GMCA  pointed out that this also has a knock-on effect  on strengthening other sectors of the foundational economy - using the supply of food  to improve people’s health through an improved diet and to improve social care through community pantry-run meals on wheels services for example.

At the same time  working with Community Payback to do this also strengthens the Community Safety  sector of the foundational economy, using  food supplied by people on Community Payback to help reduce their reoffending and pay back for previous offending, making life worth living in those communities against whom they have offended and ensuring they function more effectively.

Community Payback catalysing  community power in the foundational economy

As a result of these unforeseen implications of our project GMCA invited us to apply for funding to further develop and build on this model of Community Payback strengthening the wider foundational economy by supplying healthy affordable food to community-run  pantries.

But this was not the only unforeseen implication of our project. The National Lottery who fund it, have recently committed to putting community power at the heart of their funding in England from 2026. By community power they mean local communities being able to increase their agency, power and control over the foundational economy in the places they live – power and control over the  essential goods and services they use and the decisions that affect their lives.

Our project does just that. It uses Community Payback to enable community-run pantries to increase their power and control, not only over their food supply, but also over their health, social care and community safety. Our project doesn’t just use Community Payback to supply  healthy meals to community-run pantries. It  makes community power a reality in those pantries. It catalyses community power in the foundational economy and so has significant long term implications for putting community power at the heart of Lottery funding in England from 2026.

Locally sourced pumpkins

Cooking ready meals has continued throughout the summer and autumn, thanks to the support of our community volunteers enlisting people on probation as Kitchen Assistants to help prepare the vegetables and pack the meals.

The pumpkins in the photo were turned into a wonderful Burmise Pumpkin Curry and we donated them to help feed the homeless in Manchester and Salford though the charity Two Brews: https://twobrews.org/

While the cooking is an important ingredient of the work we do, it’s only a part of what we are trying to achieve. What we’re all about is enlisting people on probation to provide affordable and nutritious food that enables people in food poverty to eat well and to eat well sustainably.

Our meals are all about providing an affordable alternative to the cheap low protein and highly processed foods which are often all that’s available to people in food poverty and which contribute to many people having poorer diets and corresponding long term health problems.

What’s more, much  of this unhealthy food has travelled for miles to reach the shops, thus contributing to carbon emissions which damage the health of the planet as well as its people.

That’s why our focus is on growing and cooking healthy food locally and delivering it to people in the most environmentally friendly way possible. So we’re not just about enlisting people on probation to help feed the poor and hungry, we’re much more about working with them to build a more sustainable local food system for everyone’s benefit This is what we mean by supporting the foundational economy – making sure everyone  gets the  everyday universal basics like food that make life worth living for everyone. 

One of our key aims is to introduce the principles of the circular economy to the production and distribution of good quality nutritious food for the Austerity Food Retail (AFR) sector. AFR addresses people most affected by austerity and the cost of living crisis. It includes social supermarkets, pantries and other forms of community shop offering highly discounted products, and often making use of surplus, waste or rejected foods which would otherwise be thrown away. 

The circular economy is a system where food and other materials never become waste and nature is regenerated. In a circular economy, products and materials are kept in circulation through processes like maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting.

Our original plan was to introduce vermiculture – worm farms -  into the composting of food and other organic waste at our growing sites in the Spring of  2025. The aim was to use the organic fertiliser that the worms produce to improve the quantity and quality of the food we produce for AFR  during the summer months.

But one of our partner organisations, Egino Emerging  https://www.eginoemerging.org/

had the capacity to help out now and so we have taken on our first worm farm to introduce the principles of the circular economy to the production and distribution of good quality nutritious food for the AFR sector.

The bins are continuous flow wormeries. We enlist the people on probation working at our growing sites to top them up with old waste from the gardens  together with shredded cardboard (worms love the cardboard) and keep it well watered. The pipes at the front create a ledge and the worms live on top of this, in all the organic matter. They eat the organic matter and the result is a continuous flow of organic fertiliser that falls below the ledge and can be collected through the holes at the bottom for use on the growing sites to improve the quality and quantity of the yield and so turn food and other organic waste into good quality, highly nutritious food for AFR.

What’s more, by supplying us with these worm farms Egino also help us fulfil two further aims. By opening up the possibility of scaling  up for commercial production of organic fertiliser we can potentially create new income streams for AFR to bulk buy non surplus food supplies to supplement the dwindling supplies of surplus and donated food currently available to them. Many prison and community payback facilities in the United States do exactly that, so why can’t we do the same here to help the commercial sustainability of AFR?

https://eu.thegleaner.com/story/news/2019/03/25/worm-farming-saves-henderson-county-jail-thousands/3221605002/

But secondly, not only does this open up commercial possibilities to support AFR, it also helps fulfil our aim of opening up employment and self employment opportunities for the people on probation working on our project when they have successfully completed their unpaid work requirements with us.

So in the new year we will be introducing  Egino’s  Worm Farm Business Training and Support Course as an option for people on probation placed with us https://www.eginoemerging.org/free-worm-farming-course  - not only using worms to turn the circular economy, but also to turn the lives of people on probation round.

Sherlockai

Nornir has been working with volunteers to try and harness the power and the surge in interest around AI.  The plan is not to try and just maximise profit by using AI, but to use the technology for social purposes.

We have therefore developed a new Chatbot style system that is aimed to help ex offenders to adapt to life on release from prison. The release from prison can be a very challenging time for people, especially if the person has spent a long time in jail. Often these problems are simple to overcome but not if you are already traumatised by your life situation. The chatbot can help to provide this support by being available 24/7 ready to answer questions and support people who are most vulnerable.

An important point to note is that the chatbot hasn’t been designed by some teckies working in isolation. Its been co-developed by people with lived in experience of the criminal justice system making it relevant to their needs.

There has been a lot of interest from organisations who support ex offenders and we now have 2 live systems up and running.

For more information visit the web site at: https://www.sherlockai.org/

Peas growing in a raised bed

In the first 3 months we have been busy building the necessary partnerships required to make the work sustainable. This has included the following:

We have established a partnership with the Manchester Urban Diggers who are based at Platt Fields in Manchester. MUD already have a working kitchen and are excited about starting to also use it to create ready meals using their home-grown food surpluses. They are planning to run one cooking session in July as a test run. But due to the fact that its early in the season we must source surplus foods from other providers because the crops in the ground are not ready until Autumn.

We are looking to get Community Payback individual placements to help staff up the cooking process and are in negotiations with GM Probation about making this happen. Also how to get a CP team to work in the gardens growing food for the kitchens.

We have made links to a range of other interested organisations including Eat Well Manchester, Open Kitchen, Bread and Butter and also exploring the option of using a commercial kitchen at Yane Restaurant in Chorlton.

MUD is planning a Gleaning activity in the Autumn and we are making preparations for the CP teams to be part of the process and for the food gleaned, to be used in the production of ready meals.

Nornir has created a strategic partnership with GM Probation exploring how we can further develop the use of CP teams and individual placements to help support the Foundational Economy.

Staff at Nornir are seeking to build a large scale vermiculture programme in North Wales. The aim is to process 1000 tons (a year) of cow manure into organic fertiliser and once the work process is established, we will be looking to try and import the model into Greater Manchester.

Development of the growing area at Forever Fields

Nornir have been busy working with other stakeholders at Forever Fields in Manchester. To date we have arranged for a team of Community Payback workers to visit the site each Monday where they are working creating a new growing space. The results so far are shown in the photo above. So the growing of food has started at Forever Fields  - but its next season before we get full crops.

In the kitchen at Forever Fields, we have already cooked 186 ready meals using surplus and donated foods. This has been achieved using a chef and 2 community volunteers as well as CP workers helping out in the kitchen.

We have plans to continue to cook ready meals at the site and donate them to local Pantries via our links with Eat Well Manchester: https://www.eatwellmcr.org/

Our plans have been helped because Forever Fields are now appointing a full-time centre manager to help coordinate all the activities at the centre.

There has been development at the site with a base being built for the container that will be used to grow mushrooms. The plan is to use the mushrooms in the ready meals as a way of providing protein without resorting to cheap meat.

The major barrier at the moment is accessing enough surplus foods for the cooking. We are in talks with a range of other organisations who are involved in austerity retail to see how we can over come the problem. One possibly activity is to join a Gleaning later in the year where we can gather a large crop of some specific vegetables.

We are also pursuing links in regarding to developing a vermiculture presence on the site. This has been mostly with the experts at Egino Emerging: https://www.eginoemerging.org/