New Shoots in Leeds
Date Published: 8th August 2025
The last few months have seen the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Network UK welcome Jude Woods to the team to work on a new project in West Yorkshire, generously funded by the JJ Charitable Trust and Roger Ross from Serve All Trust.
Jude is bringing their considerable experience of community engagement work to a project exploring widening participation, sharing the benefits and values of CSA and exploring circular economies at the urban Kirkstall Valley Farm and the more rural Swillington Organic Farm in West Yorkshire.
This project was born out of work the CSA Network did in 2022, looking at Increasing Inclusion in CSA and will explore what might happen if a CSA has additional capacity to make connections and engage.
From Jude:
“Looking through the listing of CSA members I am amazed at the wide range of activities and approaches to being a CSA; it is a rich collection of diverse endeavours! This gives me lots of ideas and examples I can draw on during the first three months of the project when I will be focused on collaborative planning.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting to know Kirkstall and Swillington farms, spending time with the growers and volunteers, getting an overview of how they work and hearing about their goals and achievements. I have been warmly welcomed and supported to get stuck in, done some picking and a lot of chatting, as listening and learning are so important. There’s lots more of that as the summer rolls on and I’ll be connecting into the food networks, health and third sectors as well as the local communities to both farms.
We hope that this project will provide valuable learning from other CSAs across the network enabling further engagement and resilience in our movement.”
Get in touch if you want to connect with this project in West Yorkshire and keep an eye out for more blog updates over the next few years as the project unfolds.