We worked with Brighton and Hove Food Partnership to evaluate and develop food use confidence. Behaviours related to food use confidence support the reduction of food waste.

A third of all food produced is never eaten and throwing away food is one of the biggest contributors to climate change.

What We Did

The Food Use Places project is a Sussex based development project funded by the Big Lottery Climate Action fund.  It helps communities rethink and reframe their relationship with food waste, and to give them the skills, knowledge, and confidence to turn food waste into food use.  Food Matters was commissioned by the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership to develop an evaluation framework and approach for the project.

We facilitated workshops to explore how people relate to food waste in their daily lives and answering key questions: What does it mean to be confident in reducing food waste? What does a food use confident person look like? What skills, knowledge, and access do people need to make them feel more confident?

The experts that could answer those questions were the communities that the project was aiming to engage with.  The sessions focused on the different perspectives of what food waste means, which areas they felt confident in and the barriers they were facing to become more confident.

The facilitated sessions helped to develop a Food Use Confidence Framework and a tool to help structure conversations around better food use and ultimately ways to avoid food waste.

Involving the communities in the design of the framework meant it was robust, relevant and fit for purpose.

Use of the tool goes beyond an evaluation process – it also helps deliver key programme objectives: raising awareness, building understanding, signposting to
information and resources, and building participants’ food use confidence.

“Food Matters brought skills in participation and facilitation to this partnership.  And the ‘food use confidence dial’ is an easy-to-use tool which is adaptable to different settings.” ~ Vic Borrill, Brighton and Hove Food Partnership

Find out more

Read more by downloading the evaluation report and tool below.

Report

Evaluation Tool

Get In Touch

Reach out to the Food Matters team to find out more about what we do, get involved or to collaborate with us on a future project.

Get In Touch

Get in touch with the Food Matters team to find out more about what we do or get involved. We also want to hear from you if you would like to collaborate with us on a future project.