October 2022 digital edition
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MEET<br />
Edward Rosen<br />
Project director, Lambeth GP<br />
Food Co-op<br />
This month we speak to Ed Rosen, project director at Lambeth GP<br />
Food Co-op, who has also worked in the NHS as an educationalist.<br />
Set up in 2013, Lambeth GP Food Co-op brings together patients,<br />
doctors, nurses and local residents who have created a network<br />
of food-growing NHS gardens. The co-op serves both an economic<br />
and a therapeutic purpose, helping patients with long-term health<br />
conditions while encouraging local food procurement.<br />
WHAT DOES A REGULAR DAY LOOK LIKE FOR YOU<br />
AND LAMBETH GP FOOD CO-OP?<br />
We are a co-operative, but we are distributed across<br />
the whole borough of Lambeth, so our work is<br />
spread across a large area. One of our core activities<br />
is growing food; at the moment we are coming to<br />
the end of the growing season, so we’ll be selling<br />
our vegetables to NHS staff. Tomorrow we’re going<br />
to visit Sutton Community Farm – I hope to build<br />
a relationship with them as we’d like to increase<br />
our growing activity. On a regular day we focus on<br />
supporting patients, some of whom are members<br />
of Lambeth GP Food Co-op. Then once a month<br />
we have a co-operative activity, such as selling<br />
produce at King’s College Hospital. The idea is to<br />
create a network of NHS gardens across Lambeth<br />
HOW DID THE PROJECT START AND HOW DID YOU<br />
GET INVOLVED?<br />
The project started as an idea that was being<br />
discussed in the Department of Health to fund<br />
I’m confident that co-ops<br />
have a contribution to make<br />
to the reshaping of the health<br />
service within primary and<br />
community care<br />
pilot projects focusing on social enterprise,<br />
mutuals and co-operatives. This was in 2006.<br />
Nothing happened, but it led to some of us<br />
reflecting on how difficult it was to create co-ops<br />
and mutuals within the public sector, especially<br />
within the NHS. There just didn’t seem to be a way<br />
in or an alignment between the ideas and values<br />
of the co-operative movement as we understood<br />
it, and the NHS. The NHS has the value of ‘free<br />
at the point of need’, but has a very different<br />
organisational culture. Fast forward a bit, and<br />
in 2012 I made an initial proposal to Lambeth<br />
Council, which at that time was a co-operative<br />
council and part of the Cooperative Councils’<br />
Innovation Network. Lambeth said ‘Yes’. We<br />
then talked to the NHS in Lambeth, and they said<br />
‘Yes.’ We had three years’ funding to get it up and<br />
running, and we started with three GP surgeries<br />
in Lambeth in March 2013. Next March is our 10th<br />
anniversary.<br />
HOW MANY GP SURGERIES DO YOU WORK WITH?<br />
We started working with GPs based on the simple<br />
idea of building gardens at GP surgeries, in<br />
alleyways and unused spaces. The aim was to<br />
transform these spaces into a living and flourishing<br />
vegetable gardens for patients who have long term<br />
health conditions like diabetes and arthritis. We’ve<br />
built gardens at 13 GP surgeries in Lambeth, but not<br />
all of them were successful.<br />
At the moment we are working with five GP<br />
surgeries, and we also have vegetable gardens<br />
at two large teaching hospitals, Guy’s and St<br />
Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital.<br />
22 | OCTOBER <strong>2022</strong>