As founder and director of Cardiff’s award-winning Riverside Market, I have twenty years’ experience of running a local food social enterprise, which contributes to a sustainable food economy. I feel Riverside Community Market Association has met a wide range of food-related community and small-business needs in direct and practical ways, providing small scale local producers with the opportunity to trade directly with the public; and local people with access to affordable, fresh produce sold directly by Welsh producers; all in spaces where new fresh food-related business ideas can be developed as an attraction which draws new people into the area, contributing to social and economic regeneration and helping to create a sense of local community.

As founder and director of Cardiff’s award-winning Riverside Market, I have twenty years’ experience of running a local food social enterprise, which contributes to a sustainable food economy. I feel Riverside Community Market Association has met a wide range of food-related community and small-business needs in direct and practical ways, providing small scale local producers with the opportunity to trade directly with the public; and local people with access to affordable, fresh produce sold directly by Welsh producers; all in spaces where new fresh food-related business ideas can be developed as an attraction which draws new people into the area, contributing to social and economic regeneration and helping to create a sense of local community. Riverside Market is a replicable model of a financially viable community enterprise, which meets social, environmental and economic goals, while also delivering a programme of educational activities which will respond to peoples’ needs and interests and at the same time promote sustainable living. Steering the growth and development of Riverside Market as a sustainable social enterprise has been very important in my life for nearly twenty years. I’ve become passionately interested in issues to do with local food growing and the role that social enterprise can play in connecting people with ‘big picture’ issues to do with the future sustainability of Wales and the world at large.

Why are you drawn to this area of work and how have you helped community groups take their first steps to action in the past?

I have twenty years’ experience of running a successful local food based social enterprise which contributes to a sustainable food economy in our capital city. As well as steering the award-winning Riverside Market to become the largest farmers’ market in Wales, I initiated various spin-off activities such as:

• Setting up four other farmers markets in Cardiff.
• Overseeing RCMA’s education and outreach activities.
• Co-writing RCMA’s ‘Urban Farmers’ Market Toolkit’.
• Supporting a group of local women to set up the Riverside Food Coop.
• Setting up the Riverside Community Garden
• Developing the RCMA Market Garden project – a co-operatively owned social enterprise which grows certified organic produce for sale to residents and restaurants, and provides training in organic horticulture.

I have been responsible for devising and delivering a wide range of outreach and education programmes intended to introduce the pleasures and benefits of buying, preparing and eating fresh local food to a wide range of Cardiff residents, especially those living in the more disadvantaged areas of the city. This work has included: outreach programmes in schools, including creating school gardens; organising farm visits for children; delivering a series of healthy cooking classes for various community groups; piloting a ‘healthy corner shops’ programme. I led on the creation and launch of the Cardiff Food Charter and am a founder member of the Cardiff Food Council.

What is your vision of your region in 2050? What will have changed and how will we have got there?

The production, processing and distribution of ‘mainstream food’ is a major source of greenhouse gasses. By contributing to the development of a more locally based food chain for Cardiff, I hope to make a contribution to the sustainability of the capital city of Wales which will play a part in influencing the food culture of the rest of the country. In my mentoring and advisory I hope to be able to be more effective in changing people’s behaviour, as individuals and as members of organisations, in relation to all of the ways in which they could behave more sustainably, to the point where Wales can describe itself as a world leader in creating a truly sustainable economy which values the creativity and the happiness of people as well as using the limited measurement of their contribution to GDP.