As part of the Making Local Food Work programme Sustain is organising a national food co-ops conference on Monday 2 February 2009 10am - 4pm at 76 Portland Place, London W1B 1NT. The conference is free for volunteers and community workers but we will be charging a fee of £50 for PCTs and local authorities to help us subsidise travel costs for volunteers.

Our keynote speaker will be Martin Caraher, reader in Food and Health Policy at City University. He has worked extensively on issues related to local sustainable food supplies, the role of co-ops in promoting health, farmers markets and food access.

The main focus of the conference is on helping food co-ops and other community-run food outlets become more sustainable. The conference aims to provide a forum to facilitate networking, sharing experience, launching our new food co-ops toolkit and, through a number of workshops, sharing findings on areas investigated in the first year of the programme. We will be having presentations from food co-ops from across the country and will be covering areas such as needs assessment, governance, suppliers, education and volunteer support in the afternoon workshops.

Booking form: Download as 171 kb word doc

Once completed this should be e-mailed to foodcoops@sustainweb.org  or posted to sustain, 94 White Lion St, London N1 9P. Please book as soon as possible as places are limited. Once you have booked we will contact you to confirm your workshop choices and provide you with other details.