Digital Storytelling and Community Food Growing initiative 2021-22

The Digital Storytelling and Community Food Growing initiative started in Spring 2021 and is a collaboration between The Open University, Cobra Collective, Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC) and Capital Growth.

Growers in London, Reading and other UK cities were invited to participate in a course facilitated by the Cobra Collective team and supported to create their own digital stories. Participants gained skills in digital visual storytelling whilst also exploring the transformative power of urban community food growing. Participants explore and describe in their short films how growing food in their cities has created community resilience, a sense of collaboration and inclusion and extended their social networks during the pandemic and beyond.

You can read the full report, launched in December 2022, which includes all the findings and stories from the project.

Read the full report here

Watch the digital stories

We encourage community growing spaces and groups to share, screen, and discuss these stories, as well as generate new stories by taking the online module.

Find out about the online module

The stories gathered from the action research project so far have demonstrated how community food growing initiatives provide crucial social assets in our urban communities through their cooperative and socially resilient practices. They also delve into how gardens adapted and responded to the challenges of the pandemic and could respond to future disruptions.

Read some of the project learnings

As the project comes to an end, the team has been visiting some of the gardens that participated in the course to evaluate how community gardens’ activities influence collective and sustainable practices and how they could play a transformative role in people’s lives. 

Contact us here to find out more about the project.