Partnership

Professor Moya Kneafsey is a geographer specialised in research on short food supply chains and local food systems. She is the co-ordinator of Procurement for Good, with overall responsibility for the management and delivery of the project. She’s also leading our work to promote the uptake of insights and lessons learned from the project activities, so as to support more place-based public food procurement across the UK.

Julia Stew is the Procurement for Good project manager, supporting the coordination of the project and the consortium. She has successfully managed multiple large-scale European and UK projects on agroecology and food systems.

Rosemary Venn is working across the project as CAWR’s Research Fellow. Rosemary’s focus is the policy and governance tasks, as well as working alongside the hubs, working collaboratively to improve communication between food hub producers and public sector procurers through market dialogues.

Adrian Evans is an Associate Professor at CAWR, specialising in food ethics and science-society dialogue around food and agriculture. Adrian’s role in the project is to co-ordinate the development of a novel conceptual framework for understanding place-based public food procurement. This framework draws on state-of-the-art academic literatures, key informant interviews and practitioner knowledges to further enhance our understanding of place-based food procurement. Adrian is also contributing to research concerning the development of novel standards for small scale producers.

Lopa Saxena is an Assistant Professor at CAWR. She is interested in exploring how public food procurement (PFP) can be used to leverage a much-needed transition to healthy, sustainable and resilient food systems using a place-based approach. She is leading on a scoping review taking stock of the opportunities and barriers that producers, procurers, and other key actors face in sustainable public sector food procurement.

Ulrich Schmutz is a Professor of Organic Horticulture and Ecological Economics. He is also a management consultant for organic enterprises and accredited organic government inspector. His role in the project is to develop a toolkit for assessing and enhancing the sustainability impacts and social value of place-based public sector food procurement.

Amanda Amorim-Adegboye is a Professor of Public Health & Nutrition specialising in health inequalities. She is contributing to our scoping review of public food procurement in the UK as well as to the development of a web-based toolkit on sustainability impacts and the project conceptual framework.

Csilla Kiss is coordinating the impact and engagement work in the project as well as contributing to background research on public procurement of food in Scotland and supporting the project’s food hub mentoring programme.

Anton is providing guidance and consultation on running the crop trials in the Procurement for Good project with a view to include more environmentally resilient and culturally diverse crops on the public plate. He has a strong interest in growing heritage and novel crop varieties and has experience of working with community growing projects and small-scale commercial growers.

Bruce Pearce is Director of Horticultural Science at Garden Organic. In Procurement for Good he is leading on engagement with community food hubs with specific knowledge of stakeholder engagement and participatory research approaches.

David Garrett is Head of Knowledge Transfer at Garden Organic. In Procurement for Good he is project co-lead supporting activity with the food hubs and coordinating schools engagement.

Dr Gareth Owen leads Garden Organic’s work on the Procurement for Good project. He is providing support to participating Food Hubs with a view to developing and strengthening place-based partnerships for sustainable public food procurement, including school engagement and trialling new crops. Gareth likes to grow alternative crops himself. His success last year was growing Sharks Fin Melon, which somewhat overtook his garden.

Bethan is the technical lead for the Open Food Network UK in the Procurement for Good project. She is working with the food hubs to specify their requirements, liaising with the OFN software development team to bring new features to the open-source OFN digital platform, and building off-platform integrations to support the hubs with administrative tasks. Bethan also led on OFN’s work for the Sustainable Procurement Food Hubs pilot project in Wales, and outside of the office can be found at her local community garden where she runs sessions for volunteers to learn about organic growing.

Jo da Silva works for the Open Food Network (OFN) UK team focusing mainly on communications, supporting our community and co-ordinating partnership projects. She is managing the OFN budgets and team for the Procurement for Good project to ensure everything runs smoothly. She is also co-ordinating OFN’s Communications work in the project.

Nick Weir is a part-time grower on a Community Supported Agriculture project since 2001. He is a co-founder of Stroudco Food Hub (2005) and Open Food Network UK (2018).  He works with farmers, growers and community food enterprises to build resilient, sustainable local food systems. He also works as a Global Gardener with Open Food Network Global - supporting new countries to deploy the OFN platform. Nick is part of the OFN team on the P4G project; linking all the stakeholders and providing connections with other public procurement projects in the UK and in other OFN countries.

Alison Sheffield represents Social Farms & Gardens on Procurement for Good. She coordinated the Sustainable Procurement Food Hubs pilot in Carmarthenshire and Powys during 2021-23 and works across a range of projects that aim to promote and enable food systems that work for people and planet.

Miriam Turley is Procurement for Good’s correspondent in Northern Ireland (NI). She contributes her expertise on legislation and policy on public food procurement in NI and she also facilitates outreach to emerging food hubs in the region. Miriam works as Community Gardens Support. She has worked for over 20 years supporting and networking community garden projects in NI, 12 years working for SF&G, and in more recent years has been involved in formulating policy and establishing a Sustainable Food Partnership in Belfast.