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In 2008, a group of people in the Florence Park/Cowley area thought that we needed a local city farm. They had seen similar things in other cities but nothing like that was happening here. Being an agriculture county, Oxfordshire felt like a good fit. The idea was to create a space where people could connect with the environment and the food systems. One of the founding principles was that it had to be open to all.
There was a long build up, looking for land, but after about 5 years of scouting they found this site which used to be Donnington Middle school. The site had gone to ruin- it had no community benefit and couldn’t be built on because it was on a floodplain. In 2017, the group signed a 40 year lease with the County Council at peppercorn rate. That is a huge and lasting support from the County that allows this land to be used for community benefit. Land is at a premium and the farm would not be sustainable if we had to pay rent.
For several years the City Farm project was entirely volunteer led, with occasional freelance contractors. I joined as they were transitioning to a more established model in 2022. I had been a project manager working on international development projects. I began to question my role in that sector as debates around decolonising aid. My values have always aligned with prioritising locally driven initiatives and capacity building, which led me to turn my focus to the challenges right on my doorstep. I wanted to apply my skills locally to benefit Oxford.
The City Farm is an interesting interplay of food, nature and wellbeing connection. We are effectively a community hub, but with a strong focus on environmental stewardship. I think of us as ‘curating greenspace’ and making connecting with nature more accessible. If you’ve never been to a nature reserve, going to one might be hard. But at the city farm you can be supported, take part in a small way. Food is a connector and springboard for more challenging conversations about health, mental wellbeing or climate change. You don’t need to know anything to engage with the activities at the city farm, or if you already know loads and share it with others.
When I joined we grew 350 kg of vegetables and sold £300 worth in a year. This last year we sold £10,000 in vegetables, and gave away 880kg food to the food banks and volunteers in addition. 80% of our sales were through the Farm to Fork initiative that Good Food Oxford set up. We could have sold more but we want to give food away too as part of our social mission. If we sold all of it, that part of the business would break-even.
In addition to selling our vegetables we generate income through space hire, our cafe and co-delivering projects with other partners who base themselves at the farm. A local home-schooling group and a local college also use the site on a weekly basis and pay us for that. We also work with two local schools for whom we deliver weekly paid- sessions. For the rest of the income we’re reliant on grants. We are self-generating a lot of income through all these different streams and still it can feel so hard to raise enough funds. I don’t know what more we could be doing.
We’ve had lots of partnerships and we have many allies. But I cannot emphasise enough how time poor most small organisations are. The reality of the demand of day to day running makes it really hard to take that broader time to attend partnership meetings and build external relationships.
OX4 food crew has been a good example- the partnership provides resources to enable the partnership to happen. We are at least reimbursed time and the coordinator is paid. We have become strong allies to each other, which makes collaboration quicker and easier.
Farmability has been a really good partnership - they are layering onto our site and providing additional activities. We fund a kitchen facilitator through grants and they hire our kitchen and pay their support staff through their own funding. We are also part of Waste Innovation Station Hub (WISH), which is a network of Oxfordshire organisations focused on waste reduction and climate action in community projects. They have been a friend to the farm in terms of sourcing things- like a new recycled fridge and also fund us to run workshops on composting, community growing and things like that.
The university can be more extractive than supportive at times. We are often being asked to take part in research studies but they are time intensive for us (I think I spent like 5 days on one study last year in total) and we are not compensated and often don’t get to see the research. On the other hand the Farm to Fork scheme (linking small scale growers with commercial kitchens) brokered by Good Food Oxford with the college's kitchens has been really good. We’ve sold a lot of food through that.
We've had good relationships with schools and colleges. We provide work experience for schools. We have provided internships for students at the Abingdon and Witney college. That is win-win: we get a really high quality volunteer for a month and they have to do the placement as part of their course.
We’ve also had lots of informal, in kind, enabling partnerships and support - for example with the Missing Bean Cafe- we compost their coffee grounds and they donated a coffee machine, Norton and Yarrow (award winning cheese makers) donated goats and helped us with lots of advice when we were setting up of goat milking programme and various agricultural organisations too.
Funders want you to work in partnership, and we want to be able to as well, but that takes time, resources, stability. It would be good if commissioners and funders paid for the time and space it takes to create good partnerships. It feels hard to expect us to go to lots of partnership meetings to create a relationship to just apply for a small pot of money…which we may or may not get.
The charity sector is quite tenacious and we’re good at making things work on a shoestring - we deliver fantastic value for money. But when they want to see a £10,000 grant in working in partnership paying the Oxford living wage (for context 1 staff member that is around £25,500 per year) how is it going to work? The effort we put in is really hard to earn back. Even if we work with volunteers to save staff capacity- we still need to have staff to support the volunteers.
Resourcing partnership working
Partnerships are really powerful and useful to us, and everyone wants you to work in partnership. Creating partnerships takes a lot of time and energy, it is not straightforward. We need to find ways of resourcing partnership work.
A coordinated approach to planning services
It would be good to know who in the local councils did what. Also if they could bring third sector organisations together at local level to look at the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment(JSNA) and then, for example, to make a plan together-how will we tackle obesity in this ward together.
Long term funding is more effective
We are trying to run a holistic service which sustains and supports the community over time. Short projects often don't really make a difference to people with complex needs- but they are generally what funding is available for. We need long term secure funding so we can focus on making a difference to people's lives rather than chasing our tail meeting reporting requirements & finding funding to extend the project by another 6 months etc.
This case study is part of the 'Community wealth building: big conversations' project. These case studies are in the voice of the people who gave them. They seek to honestly present their successes, as well as the challenges of trying to build a more just, sustainable economy and community. We encourage conversation - so if you want to get in touch and talk more to any of the groups, please do.
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