Incredible Edible groups achieve amazing things within their communities. And we often hear about our groups working closely with other organisations to achieve more.
It might be that the other organisation is already working with a group of people you’re keen to get involved in Incredible Edible activities, like older or younger people. Or it could be that the other organisation needs your skills and knowledge to allow them to achieve something in their area – this story from Incredible Edible Ulverston/Ulverston in Bloom shows how partnering with a housing association can have Incredible results.
As with anything that involves more people, this can sometimes be challenging because there are more ideas, views and processes to take into account and decisions may be harder to take.
We’ve come up with some hints and tips to help joint working:
- Be clear what it is you want to achieve and why working with another group or organisation can help with this – be as specific as possible so that if things get tough, you can remember why it is that you’re partnering
- Set clear responsibilities within your team and with your partner organisation – who’s going to lead on what, when will it be delivered by, and how it will all come together at your final event/publication/activity?
- If there are costs involved, or if one group is funding the activity, how will spending be decided on, who will pay and how will they be reimbursed?
- How often will you all meet together? What decisions will be made together and what decisions can each of the groups take without consulting the other? Having a plan at the start can help you see where decisions will be needed so you can arrange your meetings around these key decision points.
Connecting with other groups or organisations can be really fruitful and as with your growing spaces, it’s good to have a plan of what’s going to happen when so you can make the most of the opportunity.
Case study from Incredible Edible Wakefield
In 2018 Incredible Edible Wakefield jointly hosted a Fruitful Communities event with The Orchard Project. The event ran with 50 people from over 15 community growing initiatives across the area. The two organisations split the tasks:
- The Orchard Project provided the funding and a lead contact for organising the event
- Incredible Edible Wakefield provided a lead contact who had the local knowledge and helped promote and plan the event which was advertised on Eventbrite as a joint event
- Both leads visited the venue in advance to check and agree logistics and together they agreed the programme for the day
- Incredible Edible provided the key note speaker, Pam Warhurst, plus the two leads from each organisation ran sessions at the event
- Two Incredible Edible groups delivered workshops on setting up an Incredible Edible group and running a successful apple day event
- The Orchard Project arranged the lunch from a local cafe which used local supermarket surplus food
Here’s some thoughts on the partnership working from Andy Austerfield, lead at Incredible Edible Wakefield:
“I think it started because one of our members had seen on social media that they were looking for volunteer orchard mentors and when I looked on their website it mentioned they might be interested in developing strategic partnerships so I dropped them an email. I thought the work they did dovetailed quite nicely with ours as not every piece of land is suitable for a propaganda growing and vice versa an orchard.
We also have an orchard group so there were useful resources that they could access through The Orchard Project such as training sessions and access to orchard mentors. The Orchard Project felt they had reached saturation point with orchard sites in Leeds and were looking to expand geographically and Wakefield was a nice fit.
In addition to each group reaching a new audience through each other’s social media outlets I found it really useful seeing how another organisation worked and picked up tips like using Eventbrite to promote and manage events from them and raising our profile by inviting a local dignitary like the mayor along to open our events. They are also relatively well funded so we were able to access both resources for our groups and also to run an event larger and more high profile than we would have managed alone.”
