Four action groups, and a hub about to get an operator.
Islington isn't building something from a blank page — the Islington Food Partnership already exists, already has funding, and is mid-way through restructuring itself for delivery. Its shared food hub with Camden, at Regis Road, is now recruiting the operator who will run it. This page holds the honest state of both, checked against what the rest of this working group has already learned.
Where Islington is right now
Two things are happening at once: a governance rebuild of the partnership itself, and the operator search for the physical hub it's been working toward. Neither is finished.
The Islington Food Partnership (IFP) is an established, independently funded partnership — council-funded, but not run inside the council, unlike Camden's equivalent, which sits within council structures. It's restructuring from one general coordinating group into four dedicated action groups: Healthy & Affordable Food for All, Climate & Nature Emergency, Sustainable Local Food Economy, and a new, cross-cutting Fundraising group. Each will run with roughly 10–12 members, at least one IFP staff member embedded, board sign-off on who joins, and at least one representative from every action group also sitting on the strategic board — so there's less disconnect between what a group is doing and what the board hears.
The shared food distribution hub with Camden, at Regis Road, has moved into its next concrete phase: recruiting an operator. Expressions of interest are open, with site visits arranged for anyone interested, and a deadline in early October. The initial term is two years, and part of the operator's brief is to work out the site's longer-term future, not just run day-to-day logistics. One genuine structural quirk worth naming: because Camden's food partnership sits inside its council and Islington's IFP is a separate, independently funded body, the incoming operator will have to manage two different kinds of relationship, not one symmetrical arrangement either side of the borough line.
Alongside the hub, Islington is trialling a partnership with a national hygiene-bank charity — deliberately hyper-local, in one small area first, since the shared hub isn't operational yet and the system is being tested at a manageable scale before any wider rollout. A separate idea — connecting with a national charity that distributes donated non-food essentials — has been raised but not yet followed up.
If the Regis Road site doesn't work out long-term, Islington has also asked whether a disused council building could host a hub instead. Nothing has come forward yet, though a borough-wide review of surplus school and community buildings — a consequence of falling pupil numbers — is under way, and any resulting space would be treated as a high priority for a hub.
What the shared Camden and Islington hub already confirms, and the one new question it raises
Three of these check out against what the rest of the group has already found. The fourth is something Islington is running into that nobody else has documented yet.
Islington's own social-value tool is being kept deliberately small, on purpose
Islington's Social Return on Investment tool, developed with a university partner, is being piloted with just one or two food-aid providers first — not because of caution for its own sake, but because the current version is genuinely clunky (one single line for "advice", when there are really dozens of distinct types). A direct request from the room: keep it simple enough that time-poor frontline staff will actually use it. This checks out against Birmingham's independent finding elsewhere in this group: a proper SROI study is effectively out of reach without funding a university partner directly.
The lesson to carry over: refine before rolling out, and design for the staff who have the least spare time to fill in a form — not the funders who'll eventually read the results.
See the Birmingham findingIslington is living the "both markets" question, not just discussing it
Sustain's National Lottery bid concept is framed around agroecological and organic food — but Felix Project can supply surplus for free, and food-aid budgets are tight enough that paying for "better" food is a genuinely hard sell right now. This is the live, lived version of an open design question already sitting on this page: whether one hub can serve both nutrient-dense organic supply and surplus redistribution from the same infrastructure, without one undercutting the other.
The lesson to carry over: Islington's experience here is worth feeding back to the wider group directly — it's a real test of a question the rest of the group has so far only raised in theory.
See the full findingTower Hamlets shows a fallback that doesn't need a perfect site
Tower Hamlets' hub isn't really fit for purpose, but a developer with Section 106 obligations agreed to install shipping containers on land awaiting redevelopment — giving a working food hub for a three-year term on a site that would otherwise sit empty. It's a workable, replicable model, not a compromise to be embarrassed about.
The lesson to carry over: if Islington's own review of surplus school and community buildings doesn't produce a result in time, a Section 106-funded meanwhile structure is a proven fallback, not a last resort.
See the hub anatomyA new finding, not a borrowed one — worth watching closely
Because Camden's food partnership sits inside its council and Islington's IFP is an independently funded body outside the council, the hub operator being recruited now will have to build and manage two structurally different relationships from day one — not a single, symmetrical partnership. Nobody else in this working group has documented this pattern yet, but every future multi-borough hub will likely hit some version of it.
The lesson to carry over: this is Islington's contribution back to the group, not a lesson borrowed from it — worth writing up properly once the operator is appointed and the arrangement is tested for real.
What's next for Islington
Twelve actions, in the order they were actually raised.