About the Real Farming Trust
The Real Farming Trust (RFT) runs a number of programmes which bring people together to advocate for a fairer food and farming system based on agroecology. We are looking for a communications coordinator to work across two programmes, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund: Extended Table and Twinning (see descriptions below). The coordinator will work with the programme managers of each of these programmes, as well as each programme’s partners, to draw out and communicate the learning. A key part of the communications coordinator’s role is to support community members in both programmes to advocate for themselves and their needs. We are a small charity and value honesty, empathy, care and compassion in our interactions with each other in the organisation and with the partners we work with.
The two programmes that this role covers are:
Extended Table – (3 days per week to September 2030)
Extended Table is a 5-year programme of work across the UK with four delivery partners. The Real Farming Trust’s role in the project is to evaluate the work, maximise impact from the evaluation, identify meaning and learning and to communicate this to cause wider change in food systems.
Extended Table is about bottom-up community development and self-advocacy. The communications coordinator will be serving the delivery partners to understand and draw out their messages and then amplify them.
The partners are the NOW group, Edinburgh Cyrenians, Organic Lea / Hornbeam cafe and Brighton and Hove Food Partnership. They work directly in communities of need, addressing social situations arising from learning disabilities, neurodiversity, homelessness, food poverty and marginalisation. They will offer food activities, such as community cafes, to bring people together and build community cohesion. This project is primarily about social inclusion and agency through food, not primarily about farming. It builds on a previous partnership project with the same partners called Ready Healthy Eat. There is more information about Extended Table here.
Twinning (0.5 days per week through September 2027)
The aim of Twinning is to use food as a vehicle for fostering connection and understanding between urban and rural communities. The programme links four pairs of twins, each consisting of a community-run farm and an urban community organisation. The urban community organisations are a foodbank, two community organisations working with migrants and refugees and an organisation supporting people with learning difficulties.
RFT’s role is to: (1) support the twins and manage the administrative and financial tasks of the programme; and (2) to pull out learning to share across the twins and with other organisations and local and national policymakers working to promote understanding between communities that are geographically and culturally separated from each other. Additional information about the programme can be found here.
