Report from the Community Wealth Building Webinar – 2nd December 2025

1. Introduction and Project Context

This report captures the key insights and discussions from the on-line event held on the 2nd December 2025 which featured presentations from Julian Boys (CLES), Sean McCabe (Boh’s), and Caroline Whyte (Feasta), along with reflections from Noreen Byrne (UCC), Ruth Hegarty (Food Policy Ireland), Janet Power (Talamh Beo), and Rupa Marya (Trinity School of Medicine).

The webinar focused on Community Wealth Building (CWB) as a strategy to support local food producers and strengthen local food economies. At the bottom of this report you will also find a list of links shared in the chat during the webinar. 

Alison Brogan, the coordinator of the Strengthening Local Food Economies in Ireland project, provided an overview of the Strengthening Local Food Economies (SLFE) project.

• Duration and Collaboration: A two-year project and a collaboration between Talamh Beo, Cultivate, and Feasta (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability), supported by the Irish Environmental Network.
• Goal: A research and advocacy project to develop and promote policies that better support local food producers and strengthen local food economies in Ireland.
• Strands of Work:
  1. Action Research: Led by Talamh Beo, gathering insights on the real needs and challenges of local food producers on the ground to develop appropriate policies, including a demonstration proposal for a targeted basic income for local food producers (LFP)
  2. Desk Research: Led by Feasta, exploring complementary upstream economic measures, including a Universal Basic Income, to strengthen local food economies and support LFP. 
  3. Stakeholder Engagement: Led by Cultivate – delivering in-person and online project events (including this webinar), through the established Feeding Ourselves Community of Practice.
• Output: The research findings are expected to be published in Autumn of 2026
• CWB Connection: The process of inquiry in the research identified CWB as a strong potential avenue for developing stronger local food economies. This webinar continues the inquiry process started at an earlier symposium event in Dublin in October.

2. Community Wealth Building (CWB) and Food Procurement (Julian Boys, CLES)

Julian Boys, Associate Director of Economic Strategy at CLES (Centre for Local Economic Strategies), provided an introduction to CLES and the work on CWB before presenting the report Feeding the Future – A roadmap for a sustainable, healthy and local food economy in Sheffield. 

CWB Framework

• CLES Mission: A UK national organisation (established 1986) focused on progressive economics for people, place and planet.
• CWB Definition: A progressive approach to economics and economic development aiming to retain more wealth and opportunity within local economies for the benefit of local people.
• The Problem: Traditional economic growth (GDP) has increased, but poverty rates have also risen, and median incomes have stagnated. Wealth is not benefiting the communities that create it.
• Anchor Institutions: The approach hinges on rooted-in-place institutions (local government, hospitals, universities, housing associations) that are big employers, hold significant assets (land/property), and spend large amounts of money. CWB encourages them to work together to increase their socioeconomic impact.
• The Five Pillars of CWB:
  • Plural Ownership of the Economy: The transversal pillar; changing the ownership structure (e.g., to co-ops, community groups) away from distant shareholders.
  • Land and Property: Changing ownership to favor communities (e.g., councils freeing up land).
  • Financial Power: Ensuring local funds (e.g., pension funds) are invested in the local area.
  • Employment and Labour Markets: Anchors paying the real living wage, having good terms, and requiring suppliers to meet high employment standards.
  • Procurement: (Receives the most attention) Ensuring money spent on goods and services benefits local people through spending with local and social businesses.

CWB and Food in Sheffield (Case Study)

CLES undertook a project with six anchor institutions (NHS hospitals, universities, schools, colleges) in Sheffield to bridge the gap between their food demand and local food supply. The ‘Roadmap for a sustainable, healthy and local food economy in Sheffield’ is available here 

Spending Data: The local public sector spends £14 million annually on food. Approximately two-thirds of this goes to large national suppliers, dominating the catering supplies sector.

• Challenge: Spending with a “local supplier” (local wholesaler) does not always mean sourcing local food; A key decision is prioritising spending with local businesses vs. sourcing local food.

• Challenges to Local Procurement:
  • Cost: Budgetary pressure means institutions often prioritise low price/competition, having profit targets for catering.
  • Capacity/Logistics: Many institutions lack facilities for on-site preparation, requiring processed food, which local suppliers struggle to provide. Large wholesalers also provide essential logistical support (transport, storage).
  • Standards/Compliance: Small providers are perceived as less consistent/reliable. Procurement officers prefer one large contract, and food safety risks are perceived for hospitals.
    
• Solutions/Recommendations:
  • Short-Term:
    • Developing a directory and interactive map of local producers for procurement officers.
    • Focusing on a few key product lines (e.g., processed potatoes, dairy, bakery) where local supply is robust.
    • Exerting pressure on large national wholesalers to procure locally through existing contracts.
    • Organising ‘Meet the Buyer/Seller’ events to build relationships.
    • Developing best practice guides for procurement officers.
    • Enabling small suppliers to fulfill orders together (e.g., sharing logistics).
  • Medium/Long-Term:
    • Reforming menus to match local supply.
    • Developing local buying standards.
    • Allocating public land for regenerative agriculture.
    • Reviewing school catering commissioning (e.g., bringing outsourced services back in-house).
    • Potentially establishing a buyer consortium among anchor institutions.

3. Implementing CWB in an Irish Context (Seán McCabe, Bohemian FC, interviewed by Caroline Whyte, Feasta)

Seán McCabe (Head of Climate Justice and Sustainability at Bohemian Football Club) offered reflections on CWB in Ireland, drawing on the SPARK Initiative.

• Need for Structure first, idea of immediate impact naive: Ireland lacks a culture, awareness and infrastructure for CWB. The immediate focus should be on building the necessary structures, changing the culture,  governance, and building popular movements. It’s about restructuring and returning power to communities. 
• Bohemians F.C. as a Case Study: Bohemians is working to create an instance that the rest of the country can point to, exploring CWB opportunities around food, solar, retrofitting, and high-employment businesses. The immediate priority is building the necessary scaffolding to ensure the system endures. 
• Lessons from Mondragon (Spain) and Cleveland (US):
  • Both are successful examples of cooperative ecosystems.
  • Mondragon: Illustrates that a democratized local economy isn’t automatically good for the environment (caused immense pollution in early days) or ethically perfect (produces tools for weapons). We must be clear-eyed about externalities.
  • Cleveland: Highlights the need for active culture building. After decades of neoliberalism, cooperation is not a default. The SPARK Initiative has been a three-year, resource-intensive culture-building project, leveraging the club’s 135 years of cooperative ownership.
• Scale and Policy: While CWB is place-based, solutions should be designed for scale and spread throughout the entire country.
• Procurement Challenges in Ireland:
  • Ireland adopted a very pious framework for procurement through EU procurement law, which currently mitigates against CWB goals.
  • Need to carefully map out the desired contracts and what is required to win them.
  • Practical next steps involve detailed mapping of current inflows to places where we think contracts could be won, contract size, and working with procurement professionals to see how contracts can be subdivided to give smaller producers a better chance.
• Call for Political Alignment: A practical step is ensuring that all positive movements (climate, housing, food) subscribe to CWB as a central economic tenet before the next election, speaking in one voice for system change.

4. Reflections from the Community of Practice

Noreen Byrne (Centre for Co-operative Studies, UCC)

• CWB links the micro with the transformational, providing tangible hope for students. It has a “ring of the real” about it, making change possible
• Cooperatives are an important part of the infrastructure needed for CWB that Seán mentioned
• Cooperation and collaboration needed within institutions and between institutions – and with the suppliers as well – unless procurement is coordinated outside, procurement officers are not going to deal with fragmented, unreliable supply
• We often focus on organic and horticulture, but all commodity farmers (middle agriculture) need to be considered (backbone of agriculture) – some literature suggests procurement as a means to bring them in, diversification is difficult. 
• New procurement models might shift away from the lowest cost but it is still price conscious 
• Ecosystems are important, in Preston for example they have built it around finance, education and enterprise.
• Referenced Paul Taylor’s argument that place-based approaches can fail if they operate within a centralised system, as you are still operating within a whole. The solution is to focus on system change, not just scaling innovation.
• The existing infrastructure of co-ops (e.g., credit unions), though sometimes perceived as conservative, should be leveraged – converting super tankers into flotillas.

Janet Power (Talamh Beo/Organic Market Grower)

• Procurement is a strong lever for developing local food systems, with evidence from jurisdictions like Denmark where it helped establish organics as a major aspect of the food system).
• There is potential to take that evidence and apply it here, using CWB methods to support the currently small number of agro-ecological farmers in Ireland.
• Talamh Beo advocates for scaling out rather than scaling up.
• A positive mechanism would be a collaborative approach where small growers team up to meet anchor institution needs, though this requires dedicated facilitation.
• The CWB culture and local food culture are complementary and should be developed hand-in-hand, designing with the desired conditions in mind.

Ruth Hegarty (Food Policy Ireland)

• Focussing on opportunities around public procurement, in part because it is existing public money
• It’s a relatively simple argument that public money should be used for public good, not private profit, which can help build buy-in and culture change.
• School Food Programme (SFP) is a huge opportunity: €300 million annual public money. SFP procurement is fragmented (schools procure themselves), which is an advantage, but currently dominated by large suppliers.
• The goal is to work with local community food providers (caterers) to build capacity to win SFP contracts, who can then buy from local producers (using Talamh Beo’s mapping).
• Need to develop a Community of Practice for those local food providers
• Need demonstration of change on the ground to influence policy, but trying to do the two in parallel. 
• Need to reimagine food partnerships, like it is being done in the UK, away from charitable solutions towards the CWB model.
• Crucially, to engage the “middle agriculture”, as Noreen mentioned, there must be investment in processing infrastructure and systems

Rupa Marya (Trinity School of Medicine, Deep Medicine Circle)

• Cultural Work and role of cultural workers: These ideas need to be made sexy to young people to get them interested in agroecological farming and cooking.
• Health and Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs): UPFs, which make up over 54.9% of the average Irish diet, are linked to damage in every organ. This requires policy change (e.g., outlawing UPFs in schools, as in California).
• Hospital procurement: Working to connect local farms directly to St. James Hospital. Redesigning the hospital kitchen to accept seasonal, local produce, and plans include using it as a place for community members to get healthy food and learn to cook.
• Labelling Issues: Current supply to St. James is marketed by a company that is an “Irish food producer” but the produce is not necessarily from Ireland – labelling issue. That is not to say that the company does not do great work for employment. 
• Defining Community and Wealth:
  • Community: We must consider who is included in the community and what does it mean for newcomers and refugees? Community must be radically inclusive, using food as a glue.
  • Wealth: In Oakland it means that everybody eats; farmers being well paid, not increased profit margins 
• Excited to see how Universal Basic Income (UBI) policies can weave into this work.

5. Additional Participant Contributions 

• Aggregation and Food Hubs: the burden of aggregating and distributing produce should not fall solely on the local producer. Food hubs (like those seen in Valencia) are key cooperatively owned collection points that aggregate produce for sale to restaurants and supermarkets, the potential for food hubs that can play a part in supporting local food producers to meet procurement requirements. 
• Connecting and Empowerment: CWB offers pathways for connection, empowerment, and defining local solutions. It offers a “higher purpose” and a way to work meaningfully, delivering wealth in non-monetary ways.
• Consumer Engagement: A major challenge is recruiting and engaging consumers/members for initiatives like community farms (CSA). Creative strategies, like teaching kitchens, are needed to reach people who “just don’t know or aren’t involved,” stressing the need to build the culture.
• Slow Food: Agreed that the problem is rooted in lifestyle. The Slow Food movement‘s emphasis on conviviality (sitting around a table, savoring food) is fundamental for creating demand for proper food and better health.
• CSA Strategy: Advised against being overly dogmatic or purist in CSA offerings. Cloughjordan’s example of wholesale buyer’s club for organic food can provide a baseline of security and good value, which helps with member recruitment and retention.
• The importance of Culture: The focus is always only on the economic, social and environment – Culture never there – Culture might be the biggest threat to the system as is.
• Nature Restoration Plan & Local Food Initiatives: During consultations communities all over Ireland expressed a specific desire for local food initiatives that can help connect habitats and strengthen local relationships – opportunity! 

6. Links shared in the chat

• Subscribe to the Feeding Ourselves newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/22e72a7c7d25/feeding-ourselves-bulletin

• As part of this Strengthening Local Food Economies project we (at Talamh Beo) are building a database of Local Food Producers on the Island of Ireland to help inform our advocacy work and grow momentum for Food Systems Transformation – if you are a Primary Local Food Producer/Farmer/Grower please add your details here – www.talamhbeo.ie/producer  – and please share far & wide!

• Article on the Feeding Ourselves Local Food Symposium: https://sustainable.ie/cabbages-co-ops-and-decolonisation-feeding-ourselves-hits-the-city/  

• A roadmap for a sustainable, healthy and local food economy in Sheffield

Feeding the future

• CLES is just wrapping up a few years’ work with Dublin City Council, overview here:

Community wealth building in Dublin

• NEW BOOK: Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi:

https://cooperationjackson.org/announcementsblog/2017/9/21/new-book-jackson-rising-the-struggle-for-economic-democracy-and-black-self-determination-in-jackson-mississippi

• Where is the ‘Policy’ in Dutch Food Policy Councils? How Dutch FPCs shape local food policy:

https://voedselraden.nl/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WUR-Msc-Thesis-_-Stijn-van-den-Oever-_-Where-is-the-Policy-in-Dutch-Food-Policy-Councils-how-Dutch-FPCs-shape-local-food-policy.pdf

• Procurement bill written by Alice Mary Higgins: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2021/32/ 

• Re place-based approaches research by Paul Taylor: https://paulitaylor.com/2025/11/28/why-decentralised-place-based-approaches-can-fail/ 

• A new report about bridging some of these gaps in getting local food into the right places in UK Context: https://www.sustainweb.org/news/dec25-bridging-the-gap-report/ 

• Re ultra-processed food in Ireland: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/almost-half-of-food-in-irish-shopping-baskets-is-ultra-processed-1.3382342 

• Talamh beo membership: https://talamhbeo.ie/membership/