Birmingham will be the place where they say, ‘they did it as a community.’”

Eat Make Play is a social enterprise bringing neighbours together through activities and events, and Slow Food Birmingham is the local branch of a global organisation that reconnects people to where their food comes from, in order to inspire an active interest in local food cultures, traditions and production.

Slow Food Birmingham When Kate Smith packed up her cooking school in Australia, she brought it with her to Birmingham with the idea of setting up a cooking school on a barge. Somewhere along the way she got inspired by the film Sustainable, about a man returning to his home farm to regenerate the soil, and the doughnut economics framework. “it’s such a fantastic visual illustration of how to get it right, in that we can’t just look at one problem by itself.” She says, “We have farmers shopping at food banks. It’s not the food that needs to be cheaper. It’s the system that needs to be fixed.” She decided to start the Birmingham branch of Slow Food International.

The Jewellery Quarter is an area that doesn’t have a residential history, apart from people living and working above their cafes, bars and jewellery shops, so they don’t have many independent food shops. Slow Food Birmingham runs a weekly food hub that acquires food from small producers that volunteers package for customers to pick up. They don’t rely on imported food, so during lockdown they had access to great food while the supermarkets were empty. They were inundated with people.

Through the Food Hub, Kate learned that the hardest thing for small producers is getting the food into the city, because farmers don’t want to drive in traffic, and “Birmingham’s traffic is worse than anywhere else.” The solution that Slow Food is exploring is to build several distribution hubs around the city. Two and a half years later they’re still trying to sign the lease. “It’s been a big project,” Kate says, but the whole food system is all connected. “You can’t solve one bit when you’ve got other problems.”

“I’m very keen on motivating people to have a food conversation in some way.”

Eat Make Play

In 2018, the local community hosted the Ladywood community would host a summer celebration in the reservoir playing field that they called Eat Make Play. In the same year, USE-IT resourced local people to grow creative ideas, and Sam Ewell, Ali Clawley and Kate Smith discussed how they might make Eat Make Play an everyday thing. “It’s conviviality that builds communities,” Kate says.

Eat Make Play was designed to nurture and unlock the full potential of residents in B16. The Active Wellbeing Society came to the group with funding to set up a sharing library for everyday items and Eat Make Play hosted the Share Shack shop, where anyone could borrow things they needed, or drop by to make something new, mend something old or have a go at something different. “We opened the weekend before the first restrictions for COVID. And we closed the week that everything lifted again. So it was a really difficult time,” Kate says. But what they saw by the end of those two years was how much the community responded to having a space where they could have those conversations and create.