Black Food Fund: Origins

Hi, we’re Hello Brave and Shift. We’re in the process of setting up a new experimental community-led funding committee called the Black Food Fund. This is a three-part blog about the start of this 2-year journey.

Blog One.

This month, as we start to pull together the building blocks of the first Black Food Fund, we’ve been thinking about origin stories. Both the origin story that got us here and the origin story we’re shaping now. This blog is about both.

Looking back

The Black Food Fund started, conceptually anyway, in 2019. The initial project, cooked up by Shift, Hello Brave** and Impact on Urban Health, explored how Impact on Urban Health could better involve local people in their work with the Good Food Fund.

As part of the answer to that work, Hello Brave and Shift brought together a paid group of local leaders to figure this out. Out of that popped two ideas for community involvement.

• A Community Incubator (intended to support local healthier Black food entrepreneurs)
• Lambeth and Southwark Insights Playbook (intended to provide food businesses with rich data and insights about local tastes, preferences and flavours).

Impact on Urban Health decided to invest in both. They asked us to commission two organisations to work on those projects and that’s when we started noticing the workings of resources and power. Especially the power we held to decide what the work looked like and who was awarded the resources to do it.

At that point, we took a pause and decided that instead of continuing to grow our power and influence over this work, we should be finding ways to share or relinquish it. So instead of playing that role, we put that decision in the hands of people living and working locally instead.

We pulled together a prototypical committee to decide how the money would be spent and the first (less pithy named) version of the Black Food Fund was born.

We ran that version in 2021/22. The group designed and delivered a grant funding process.

Fig 1. Some images from the prototypical version of the Black Food Fund Committee

There were many bumps in the road. We didn’t budget enough time, people were committed to other things, we were designing as we went and everywhere we encountered potential accidents, risks, issues and missteps. However, within that, the team at Impact on Urban Health saw potential. And so, once again we changed (or complicated) course.

That change of course saw us offering sincere apologies to current (very patient) grant holders for changing plans on them once again. It also saw us bring together yet another group. This time a co-design team, tasked with designing a new version of this prototype committee capable of administering much larger amounts of grants.

Fig 2. The journey to the Black Food Fund

Where we’re headed

Out of that process came the Black Food Fund. A 2-year learning programme that builds on our three years of community-driven design and prototyping.

When it launches later this year, the Black Food Fund will comprise a committee of people living and/or working in Lambeth and Southwark. As a group, they will have the authority to administer circa £450k worth of funding fully delegated by Impact on Urban Health.

This funding will focus on strengthening locally-rooted support for food entrepreneurs. The ultimate aim is to improve the local food system. Ensuring all families can access healthy and affordable food. Funding for this work is delegated to the committee by Impact on Urban Health, hosted by Shift and facilitated by Hello Brave.

You can see the full co-designed concept for the Black Food Fund here. Beware, it’s a beast.

The aim of this learning project is twofold.

First, to increase community involvement in Impact on Urban Health’s children’s health and food programme. Specifically the part of that strategy that wants to boost the chance that healthier food startups have to thrive in areas like Lambeth and Southwark.

Second, and we think more importantly, to learn what it takes to devolve funding and power to community-led committees. The difficulties of doing this. And what it takes to do this well.

So with two years of funding secured for this work, we’re now starting to put our foundations for this work in place.

The first step involved working to design the draft recruitment process, role criteria, job description, draft recruitment assets, bring together an amazing recruitment panel to crit, redesign and run that end-to-end recruitment process and create other foundational documents like a draft collective contract for this work. We’ve made good and fast progress on all of that and we’re now midway through our process of recruitment.

Fig 3. A pic of the new Black Food Fund recruitment panel

You can read more about the role here. Note: Recruitment is now closed.

Bumps in the roads

During that process, however, we also realised that a lot of this journey is not functional. It requires some much deeper work. Work to make sure we aren’t accidentally recreating the unjust systems of power, resources and oppression that we were trying to undo. A mistake that’s too easy to make.

Noticing this deeper work to be done has been tricky because it doesn’t represent itself in to-do lists, designs and plans. Sometimes it’s obvious, but more often hides itself in feelings, behaviours, tensions and worries…we feel it in our bones.

A non-exhaustive list of the things showed up for us in different ways.

• The slightly embarrassed awkward feelings of stating that this work on Black food equity is housed by a large, successful, white-led org — awarded an incredibly large sum of money intended for a community to which they don’t belong. Felt as heat on the neck.😟
• The head-scratching moment when you realise that you’re working on a collective contract that’s supposed to balance risk, hold all parties to account, and be super fair. But you are one of those parties. Will it end up most fair for you? Felt as pressure behind the eyes.😣
• The shame-inducing feeling of wanting to make sure the role of the Black woman freelancer is visible and valued so that the large white-led org doesn’t take or doesn’t seem to take credit for hidden Black labour. But also check yourself as to whether you want to ensure this visibility and value for the right reasons or because of ego or optics. Felt in the cheeks. 😳
• The sense of dread when you realise that you hold a tonne of power in this process, and think you’re using it for good but wonder if that’s exactly what all of the other power holders and power hoarders before you felt. Felts as a knot in the stomach. 🤢
• The sense of unease at being paid more than the rest of the team on paper because you’re employed by a bigger org #overheads, and the impact that has on feelings of value and being valuable in this work. Felt like a warming of the ears. 😬
• The slight mindmeld of needing to stop thinking of ourselves as project and budget holders and start thinking and behaving like project and budget hosts. Impacting everything from the way we make decisions to the ways money is spent. Felt as pressure in the head.🤯

Everywhere issues of resource. Everywhere issues of power.

For us, this highlights and reminds us that systemic oppression and inequality work their way into society through habits. Habits that are formed because of structures and norms. And these habits don’t fall down racial lines. If you live and work anywhere influenced by oppressive histories, they are alive in all of us. They are baked into the way that organisations are set up, the way we organise, the way we work. All of it nudges us towards behaviours that calcify power, hoard resources and pass along risk. The cost of feeling safe and secure. This brilliant and brave piece by Charity So White really brings this to life. No one, even the best-intentioned of us, is immune.

Course correcting

To help us find a way through, we’ve been practising making space to feel and name what we feel in our bones. A way to spot, name and redesign bad foundations, bad origin stories that will trip us up on the road ahead. Nothing big and formal (though we do have monthly reflection sessions, which are helping) but just an expectation of how we work and challenge each other day to day. It won’t be perfect but we hope it will help us design towards our preferred future deliberately and not recreate the current future by accident.

Here are some small things we’ve changed so far.

ONE: Full delegated authority to the committee written into the delegated authority policy document at the hosting org and in collective contracts

TWO: Autonomy for the committee (and before the committee is here — for the small core team of two) to budget and spend money autonomously where they believe it is in the best interest of the committee

THREE: Agreement that the core team must act in the best interest of the committee not the best interest of their individual orgs. Baked into contracts.

FOUR: Separation (where possible) between people able to legally bind themselves or their orgs to a contract and the people designing those contracts. This becomes hard with orgs that are one-person-big like Hello Brave so we’ve agreed to keep an eye on and reflect on this

FIVE: Rejig the ‘secured budget’ when accounting — to only include that part of this budget used for set up. Nothing beyond that should be considered guaranteed.

SIX: Move day rates so that all parties are on the same day rate and where parties cannot be in the same day rate because of overheads etc., being clear on the difference in day rate (e.g. cost of fiscal hosting) the reason and being clear that the committee can change the way they host this work

We are sure that with this first swoop, we haven’t caught everything that will challenge the foundational integrity of this work. But we’re pleased to already be practising an approach to sensing the minor issues and irks, naming them, discussing them (sometimes in painful detail), and finding ways to course correct.

This gives us hope, if nothing else, that we’re writing a better origin story. So that when the committee is finally in place, that slightly better future can feel possible and true.

We’ll be aiming to blog every month during this set-up phase. The next blog will be from portfolio manager Alisha Mulhall from Impact on Urban Health. Thanks for reading. We look forward to updating you soon.

This work has been funded by Impact on Urban Health, hosted by Shift and facilitated by Hello Brave.

**Note: Tayo from Hello Brave was working at Shift when this work started but continued working on it when she left to be a freelancer. Felt weird to do, and after much back and forth while writing this blog we named her here so her role in the story doesn’t get lost. She also went back and forth on doing this in the third person. The third person won. 🙈