Voluntary Retailer Researcher

This is an exciting new opportunity to play a role in a national Mapping Local Food Webs project; the main part of Campaign To Protect Rural England’s (CPRE’s) work to protect the countryside through local foods.

We are looking for people with a passion and interest in local food to interview retailers in the following towns and cities across England: Hastings, Totnes, Leicester, Sheffield, Kenilworth & Knutsford.  Volunteers will use an interview tool prepared by a Coventry and Warwick University research team to build a picture of retail practices in your area.  This information will complement other surveys and questionnaires targeted at consumers, residents, farmers, growers and other local food producers in these areas.

The work is flexible in days and hours, we are hoping to find people to help with this work between January 2009 and March 2009.

Suggested activities

The volunteer will assist a CPRE Regional Co-ordinator who will be working within their region with the following tasks:

·         Work in  a team  to identify which retailers in your town source and sell local food

·         Identify retailers to interview about the local food they source and how their business contributes to the local community, economy and environment

·         Arrange and carry out  interviews with local retailers 

·         Keep in regular contact with volunteers working on other elements of the project and update the team on your progress

·         Report back your findings to the Regional Coordinator and other teams within the project

Background

The Campaign to Protect Rural England exists to promote beauty, tranquillity and diversity of rural England by encouraging the sustainable use of land and other natural resources in town and country

The Mapping Local Food Webs project is a strand of the ‘Making Local Food Work’ programme, a collaborative partnership of organisations led by the Plunkett Foundation.  CPRE is leading the Mapping Local Food Webs project within the programme and will work in close collaboration with Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming

This project aims to give people the materials and support they need to ‘map’ – research and record - their local food networks or webs in their towns and cities across England.  The findings should increase understanding of the links between producers and consumers, and the impact those links have on people in urban and rural areas.

By finding out how local food webs work in individual towns and cities, this project will encourage understanding of local food webs and promote support for the production and better availability of local food.

To really understand  local food webs we need to go out into your town or city  and find out more about the retailers that source and sell local food and drink.

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