By Zarina Ahmad, Co-Director, Wen
As Just FACT (Just Food and Climate Transition) comes to an end, I’ve been taking time to reflect on the past five years of the programme – not only on the impact it has had on communities in Tower Hamlets, but also on how it has shaped me as a leader. At the heart of these reflections are questions of power, leadership and what meaningful change really looks like when you approach it through a feminist lens.
Building a fairer, more sustainable food system has never just been a technical challenge. For me, Just FACT began as a deeper question: what would it look like to transform food systems by putting communities, particularly women and racialised and marginalised groups at the centre of decision-making? What becomes possible when local knowledge is genuinely trusted, and power is consciously shared?
Building a fairer, more sustainable food system
When Wen stepped into the role of lead partner, we took on responsibility for planning, management and delivery. Yes, that meant managing the partnership, supporting projects directly, overseeing onward grant-making, coordinating evaluation and learning, reporting to funders and identifying influencing opportunities.
But for us, leadership was never just about oversight. It was about how we show up. It was about holding values in the room. It was about building trust, sharing power and working alongside communities, not above them.
Feminist leadership
A feminist lens changes how you lead. It asks:
- Whose knowledge counts?
- Who feels confident enough to speak?
- What would it look like to genuinely redistribute power?
These questions sit at the heart of Just FACT. And in food systems, they are urgent. Women are often the ones making daily decisions about food in households. They hold cultural knowledge. They lead community responses. They are already doing the work of care, sustainability and survival. And yet their voices are so often absent from policy tables and funding conversations.
Just FACT – a different approach
Just FACT was an opportunity to do things differently – to treat food not just as a supply chain, but as a system of relationships: between people, land, culture, health, housing and power.
For me, that meant practising what we talk about at Wen: generous leadership. It meant trusting partners. It meant making funding processes supportive rather than extractive. It meant seeing evaluation not as a compliance exercise, but as collective learning. It meant asking how we could use our position to amplify community expertise rather than speak over it.
Centering women’s voices
It also meant being intentional about centering women’s voices. Our work is inclusive of all genders, but we know that power in environmental spaces is not evenly distributed. If we do not consciously create space for women, particularly racialised and marginalised women, that imbalance simply reproduces itself.
One of the most powerful things about Just FACT has been seeing what becomes possible when communities are properly resourced and genuinely trusted. Not just to deliver activities, but to shape agendas, influence local systems, and imagine futures that reflect their lived realities.
Future transformation
I genuinely believe that places like Tower Hamlets can become landscapes of wellbeing and environmental sustainability. But that transformation will not come from top-down solutions alone. It will come from investing in the people who are already holding communities together, often invisibly, often without recognition.
Just FACT has reminded me of something I’ve seen time and time again in this work: when women are genuinely trusted, properly resourced and meaningfully connected to one another, the ripple effects are extraordinary.
More than a project
It’s never just about delivering a project. It’s about someone finding their voice in a meeting for the first time. It’s about confidence growing quietly in the background. It’s about new leaders emerging who didn’t previously see themselves that way. It’s about conversations shifting, in communities, in institutions, in policy spaces, because the right people are finally being heard.
For me, that’s what real impact looks like. And that’s why this way of working matters so deeply, not just for food systems. Not just for environmental work, but for the future of justice itself.
Read the Just FACT end of programme report
Zarina Ahmad, Co-director, Wen
Zarina is an expert in equalities and climate change, increasing participation of under-represented groups in environmentalism. She was named as one of the top 30 influential women contributing to the environment and sustainability by BBC Woman’s Hour.
