by Ele Forster
We celebrated another successful year of our Highland-wide AGM gatherings on the 20th September. Designed to empower communities and make our AGM as accessible as possible. We’re very grateful to our event partners – Incredible Edible Inverness, Balmacara NTS, Highlands and Islands Climate Hub, Cairngorm National Park Authority and Knoydart Farm CIC for all their support, great ideas and hard work putting on these wonderful events with us.
Each had its own focus and flavour, depending on what the community / partner felt was helpful for them:
PLOCKTON GATHERING
Plockton’s gathering, with Balmacara NTS had a focus on crofting, and we enjoyed lots of interesting conversations including exploring a local food hub, microdairy, venison supply chains, community composting and more.
We heard about Balmacara’s ongoing feasibility study into some of these options. After a good feed of local produce from Off the Croft catering, we enjoyed a fantastic tour of a local croft. Balmacara NTS are a wonderful example of a large land-owner trying to strengthen the local community and food system using the resources they have access to. We’re looking forward to hearing more of their plans as they evolve.
INVERNESS GATHERING
We had a great gathering in Inverness, hosted by the wonderful team at Incredible Edible Inverness. We celebrated community food projects in Inverness and beyond. There were activities for all the family to get involved, with apple pressing proving most popular.
It was great to see people of all ages interacting with the dig for tatties, apple tasting, tomato seed saving demo and plant swap. It was lovely to meet lots of non-members and have an opportunity to introduce Highland Good Food Partnership to those taking an interest in their community.
KNOYDART GATHERING
Being on the Knoydart peninsular, our gathering in Inverie, in partnership with Knoydart Farm CIC, was the most isolated.
But due to the great turnout from the community, and our event coinciding with Just Walk (a walk from Skye to Glasgow to highlight land rights issues), we had over 50 people joining us for a delicious lunch of Knoydart venison stew!
The morning saw staff from the Highland Council Waste Management team engaged in conversation with members of the Knoydart community about waste issues. All waste currently has to be carried off the peninsular by boat, including food waste. An existing pilot project between the Farm and Forge (community owned pub) has proven the potential for in-vessel composting of food waste on site, and we’re excited to be supporting the exploration of a larger project that would cater for more of Inverie community.
AVIEMORE GATHERING
Our Aviemore event was organised with the Highlands and Islands Climate Hub and the Cairngorm National Park Authority, to provide space for them to strengthen their Community Grower Network, which was created earlier in the year. As part of the morning, we were shown around the local Badenoch and Strathspey therapy garden at Aviemore Community Hospital.
The project manager of the therapy garden encouraged us to all think of how we can make our community growing spaces more accessible through the use of things like long-handled trowels and table-top potting activities. We then tucked into an amazing lunch from Speyside Kitchen and Bog Bakes.
A big thank you…
…to all who helped and took part! Due to the wonderful activities our partners helped organise, we had over 40 people at our actual AGM (as well as those joining us online) and we met loads of folk who had not heard of HGFP and are now signing up to be members.
We really enjoy the process of engaging with new community organisations each year, and working with them to develop an event which meets a local need in the theme of local food. We try to spread out our events throughout the Highlands, so please do get in touch if you’d like to help host a gathering with us next year!