We had a great steering group meeting yesterday with representatives from Islington Council, Capital Growth and Philip and myself. Those statistics I’ve been badgering you for looked great – over 1500 people spoken to about food growing and over 600 volunteer hours between you in the past six months.

We also discussed an interesting Islington anomaly which is that you’ve been really active but not necessarily signing up households. This is partly to do with the fact that lots of you volunteer specifically at community gardens so are supporting growers within that environment which is great, but also there does seem to be a bit of a block about getting names registered as official ‘households’.

So the next stage for me is twofold; firstly to amend the way you can report your hours to reflect and celebrate the community based support and advice many of you are giving and secondly, to work out what does and doesn’t work in terms of household sign-ups and see if any changes need to be made to our pilot programme to improve it. Please contact me with any suggestions of what has been un/successful for you.

Contact Kate