Draft, shared for early review. A partner workstream with the Islington Food Partnership.
An overview for everyone working with the Islington Food Partnership
The Islington Food Partnership (IFP) already exists, already has funding secured to 2028, and is restructuring itself into four dedicated action groups so it can actually deliver against its plans, not just coordinate conversation about them. Alongside that, its shared food distribution hub with Camden is now recruiting the operator who will run it. This page is a single place to see the ambition behind both, how they connect to work already happening across London, and how it all stays coordinated.
Instead of one general coordinating group trying to cover everything, the partnership is organising around four specific ambitions — so people can commit to the part they actually care about, without having to sit through the rest.
Mapping the borough's food services so there's a genuine balance of free, paid-for and community-priced options, and connecting people to the right kind of support — not just calories, but nutrition, advice and dignity together.
Connecting food waste, composting, growing spaces and shared eating so they reinforce each other, rather than running as separate, disconnected programmes.
Connecting local and corporate business into the food system through surplus, employment routes and genuine social value — not treating business engagement as an afterthought to the "real" work.
A new, dedicated group testing what the partnership can raise together — on top of, not instead of, what individual members already do well on their own.
Nobody is pretending the old structure worked perfectly. The point of doing this in front of the wider membership is so people can see, and shape, what replaces it.
Includes a councillor holding the Health & Social Care portfolio, a poverty-reduction lead, and the public health team — food named directly as a key part of that brief, not a side issue.
Includes the director of a forum supporting people seeking safety, who also developed the borough's cost-of-living support programme — alongside community food organisations across the borough.
A small, part-time staff team coordinates the partnership itself, funded by the council but operating independently of it — a genuine structural difference from Camden's food partnership, which sits inside its council.
Felix Project has been working with at least ten boroughs already building or exploring a hub, coordinating the Hubs & Markets Working Group to share best practice and encourage collaboration instead of separate funding bids. That's led to Sustain building a consortium and sharing their National Lottery bid with boroughs, asking for expressions of interest.
Focused beyond hubs and civic infrastructure alone — on the collective buying power of London as a whole, including larger procurement and business purchases — and building a wider portfolio of work around that focus.
Islington's hub is shared with Camden and sits inside the same working group as Lambeth, Newham and Tower Hamlets. What Islington learns here is meant to travel, not stay local.
The wider group Islington sits inside — spanning most of north and east London, comparing real hubs in Lambeth, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Camden + Islington.
The fuller working note: the governance rebuild, the hub operator search, and what's next.
The wider argument this work sits inside — six different levers for moving London's buying power behind organic, resilient, civic-led food.
The full, London-wide portfolio this workstream is one part of — councils, national government and people on the ground building on the same foundations.
A named risk from restructuring is that the four action groups drift apart. These are the mechanisms meant to stop that.
Expressions of interest for the Regis Road hub operator are open, with site visits arranged — the concrete, physical piece of this work moving fastest right now.
Each action group now feeds the board a light-touch written highlight report before each quarterly meeting, rather than a long verbal update — proposed directly in the room as a way to respect people's time.
Action groups share agendas with each other where their work overlaps, and each group has at least one representative sitting on the strategic board — so no group operates in a silo.
Islington sits inside a wider, regularly-meeting group comparing real hub examples across boroughs — so lessons travel both ways, not just from Islington out.
See the working group's own work-ahead listExtending the experiential format already run in Camden to Islington and other London boroughs, to build shared political momentum behind the collective-buying ambition.
A shared library of hub proposals, capacity models and go-live plans from every borough already building one — including Islington's own governance rebuild, once written up properly.
As the operator is appointed and the action groups deliver their first plans, both this overview and the more detailed state-of-play note get updated — so anyone joining later doesn't start from zero either.
Read the detailed working note
