Sustain wins Caroline Walker Trust award

Sustain took home the award for Charity Food Campaigner of the Year at this year’s Caroline Walker Trust (CWT) awards, which took place in London 12 June.

The theme for this year was food sustainability, whilst the Charity Food Campaigner of the Year award looked at outstanding work in promoting public health by maintaining and advancing standards of food and nutrition.

Ben Reynolds, Deputy CEO of Sustain said:

“This award is testament to the relentless campaigning and tireless work of Sustain’s staff and our alliance members, without whom we would not have delivered the achievements of the last two years, saving school fruit and veg scheme and the sugary drinks tax which were both at points looked like they were to be axed, alongside improvements in how the Healthy Start voucher scheme is run, improving the affordability and access to fruit and veg. All of this is built on partnerships with local and national organisations and champions.”

Sofia Parente, Head of Local Action at Sustain said:

“The award is a testimony to the networks we work with to ensure more infants and children access the nutritional safety nets of Healthy Start and School Fruit and Vegetable schemes. This award is for the hundreds of public health teams, food partnerships and other organisations that have worked alongside Sustain and our Veg Cities campaign to ensure more people have access to healthy fruit and veg.

About Sustain

As an alliance with over 20 years track record, Sustain is focussed on the creation of a sustainable, equitable and healthy food and farming system. By working with over 100 national organisations, as well as our extensive local and issue specific networks, this makes us uniquely placed as an organisation that campaigns for healthier food and food environments, in the context of the alliance’s other interests, ranging from farming and conservation, supply chains and workers’ rights to food poverty, health inequalities, and better food culture, and with this the understanding of a broader set of social, economic and environmental factors. We convene and catalyse, provide leadership and a platform for these organisations and partners to shift focus from personal choice and responsibility to society-wide levers for change, building learning from local authorities and communities, to inform national government policy and business behaviour.

Recent wins

In a milestone win for our Children’s Food Campaign and our alliance members, legislation restricting location-based and multi-buy price promotions of products high in fat, salt and/or sugar (HFSS) was passed in December 2021; followed by proposals for legislation to introduce a 9pm watershed and restrictions on online advertising of junk foods which we have long campaigned for.

Following our work with Transport for London on their healthier food and drink advertising policy which has led to 1,000 fewer calories bought by Londoners, over 70 local authorities have signed up to our workshops and downloaded our toolkit, with many adopting this policy.

Working with partners, our Veg Cities campaign, which celebrated its 500th member in June 2021, ensured the Government reinstated the school fruit and vegetable scheme, which meant 430m portions secured for children for this last school year.

We also exposed low uptake of government Healthy Start vouchers for fruit, vegetables, milk and infant formula for low-income families of babies and young children. Our campaign, supported by 0ver 150 organisations, spotlighted major problems with digitisation of the scheme, costly telephone helplines, families losing eligibility and delays in processing, as well as calling for voucher value and eligibility to be increased, leading to Government improving some of these measures.