A Menu for Change: Cash, Rights, Food is a three-year project, funded by the Big Lottery Fund, and managed by Oxfam Scotland, Poverty Alliance, Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland and Nourish Scotland. We aim to reduce the need for emergency food aid by ensuring people across Scotland get the cash, rights and food they need before they are in crisis.
To do this, we are:
- Working intensively in Dundee, East Ayrshire and Fife to support public and third sector services to move away from using emergency food aid as the primary response to food crisis by developing models of intervention that address the underlying causes of food insecurity to prevent repeat crises - ultimately reducing the need for food banks and other emergency food aid.
- Investigating what leads people to experience acute food insecurity and identifying their short and longer term outcomes following an experience of crisis. We are gathering evidence about how services and referral pathways can better meet people’s needs, including by preventing repeat crisis.
- Using learning, analysis, and evidence to influence governments’ policy and practice to ensure everyone has enough money to buy food.
- Sharing local good practice all across Scotland.
CPAG in Scotland has been an integral part of this project since its inception and hope it will have a lasting impact in ensuring emergency food aid does not become a permanent part of Scotland’s social safety net.
