Growing together

The Farming the Future initiative was launched in 2019 by The A Team Foundation and The Roddick Foundation. We’ve since been joined by other funders who share our commitment to the agroecological movement – a way of producing food through regenerative farming practices that benefits people and the planet. We want to use collective power to build a better system that furthers social and environmental justice.

At Farming the Future’s founding event, we brought together 40 organisations from the funding, charity and farming sectors to imagine a regenerative future for UK food production. We explored how funders could most effectively pool their resources to support an agroecological movement.

Collective experience

We actively seek out learning, wisdom and understanding from people with first-hand experience of growing and selling food, working with marginalised communities, informing policy-makers, and organising for change. We currently have six ambassadors from different areas of the agroecological movement who share their unique perspectives with our collective fund. They identify gaps in our current funding provision and suggest new areas for us to support where they see the best potential for impact. Our ambassadors have been a guiding light for Farming the Future as we’ve developed. We’re so grateful for their passion and expertise.

We’ve always encouraged collaborative funding bids – applications need to come from a minimum of three organisations working together. We find these collaborations achieve so much more than they would have done if they were from individual organisations alone. However, recent feedback has shown us that some organisations find collaboration challenging, particularly some of the smaller organisations whose capacity is already so stretched. We’re considering ways to offer better support to these groups, and may look to accept individual bids in future.

Equity and inclusion

We recently funded a collaboration between the Ubele Initiative, OrganicLea, Black Rootz and Land In our Names (LION) to investigate the structural inequalities that exist within the current UK food growing sector, and how it prevents communities of Black people and people of colour from accessing land and becoming farmers here in the UK. Their report, Rootz Into Food Growing, includes important recommendations for the wider farming sector to incorporate anti-racist, equity-led practice into its work.

As we launched in 2019, we had only delivered one round of funding before the pandemic hit. In 2020, we decided to launch an emergency support fund alongside our general fund. We grew fast during that time, bringing on board quite a few new funders who wanted to support the UK farming sector. It means we haven’t had as much time as we would have liked to consolidate our overall purpose. We’re currently undergoing a strategic and governance review to ensure all our work is in alignment with our shared values. We’re looking at participatory grant-making practices and handing over more of the decision-making responsibility to the organisations we fund and the communities they support.