Shropshire Good Food Partnership is a CIC with a core focus on ensuring that the Shropshire area has a fair and resilient food system. It also aims to ensure that people from all backgrounds have access to healthy and nutritious food. To achieve this, the Partnership works with companies and organisations across the environmental and food sectors to support its wider goals.
CHIP supported the pilot of the “Feeding Resilience” project. This community-led project was designed to make it easier for people from disadvantaged areas of Shropshire to access good, nutritious food while also learning new skills, such as growing and cooking. The project delivered community demonstration sessions, showing participants how to grow food from seed. Once the food had grown and was ready to harvest, participants were shown how to use it to make quick and easy meals that they could try at home.
The project took place in the Dawley, Brookside and Stirchley areas of Telford. These communities faced several barriers to accessing healthy food, including low incomes, high levels of deprivation and limited local amenities. The Food Partnership carried out a consultation in the area, which found that local shops did not always provide what people needed and that waiting lists for allotments to grow food were long. It was clear that people wanted better access to good food, as well as more ideas for cooking healthier alternatives.
The project has been a real success and has brought the Dawley, Brookside and Stirchley communities together. The Partnership ran 10 community events and sessions between October 2025 and March 2026, including allotment days, community meals, family drop-in sessions, and cooking and growing classes. All events organised by the Partnership were very well attended, with one Christmas community event welcoming more than 200 people. Overall, the money provided by CHIP enabled the communities of Dawley, Brookside and Stirchley to access healthier food. Alongside this, participants made connections with people in their community and learned new skills along the way.
To find out more about Shropshire Good Food Partnership, please visit their website: https://www.shropshiregoodfood.org/.
The Community Chest Fund supports projects and initiatives in the local communities where CHIC operates. If you have a project or initiative that will make a real difference to the community, please visit the Community Chest Fund page on the CHIP website for more information.
Testimonial
“As a volunteer group, we benefited greatly from having the support of a larger organisation in terms of publicity, providing resources and liaising with the council to plan the events, as well as helping on the day by providing fire food and other activities such as the seed bank and seed bombs and the smoothie bike. If we had not had this support from Emma and SGFP we would not have been able to host the events due to having limited experience/funds/manpower. The events were a great success and helped raise our profile by attracting new visitors and volunteers to the community garden. Many of the visitors did not know the garden was right on their doorstep and this shows how important it is to hold events like this to show people what is going on in their local area and how they can get involved.”
Liz Penfield Wells, Secretary of the Dawley Community Allotments