The Belfast Way
The Partnership was initiated in 2023 by the city’s Community Planning Partnership and has been building a shared vision for sustainable food in the city. The partnership is made up of over 23 organisations across sectors and is driven by the following values developed over the past 2 years.
Food Justice: Acknowledging that everyone has the right to affordable, culturally appropriate, and nutritious food, grown in ways that respect those who produced it, animals, and the environment.
Systems Driven: Recognising food challenges (including climate change, biodiversity, health, poverty) are interconnected and the solutions to them must tackle the root causes.
Circular and Regenerative: Working for the environment and people in an integrated way that captures local value, restores ecosystems and minimises waste.
Resilient: Creating value for local food production, promoting sustainable land use, and preparedness so communities are able to cope with and adapt to food supply chain disruptions brought about by climate change and other global shocks.
Place-based and sustainable: Understanding that people’s experience of the food system is different depending on where you live across Belfast. Prioritising equitable and fair supply chains that ensure decent pay and conditions for producers and workers.
Participatory and asset-based: Focusing on what’s strong, not what’s wrong. Building strategies with input from residents, workers, marginalised groups and their representatives, businesses, and public bodies (and academia where appropriate).
Community Wealth Building: Facilitating broader ownership of the economy; keep money circulating locally; develop progressive procurement policy and practices.
How the Strategy was developed
The process of developing the strategy has been led by a team commissioned by Belfast City Council that includes Community Garden Support, Brink! Stories CIC, Grow NI and Ulster University, supported by the Food Ethics Council.
The Strategy document has been written by members and working groups of the Belfast Food Partnership, and practitioners themselves with deep and diverse expertise in the food system. Engagement with people involved in the food system in Belfast has taken place, as well as those with lived experience of accessing food in the city.
The Strategy has been collaboratively developed with respect for a plurality of views, opinions and beliefs gathered via many workshops, conversations and events, underpinned by a considerable amount of research and references.
The engagement process ..
.. involved over 40 meetings and events engaging over 200 people between January and April 2025, including two Belfast Sustainable Food Partnership meetings and three BSFP working group meetings, presentations to the 4 Belfast City Council Area Working Groups, a presentation to the Our Planet Board of the Community Planning Partnership, 3 bespoke workshops involving people with lived experience of food insecurity, focused meetings with DAERA, Climate Co+ Centre, CoCentre for Sustainable Food Systems, SECA, Unite, Nourish NI, Belfast City Council officers from Place and Economy, City and Neighbourhood Services, City and Organisational Strategy, 6 public facing events and well as many individual meetings and conversations with individual and organisational stakeholders.