Heart-to-Heart:what a markethas to prove

The Heart-to-Heart Market is our first flagship idea: bring small local producers and buyers into the same room and see whether income actually moves. It is also the easiest thing we could build to photograph well and the hardest to build honestly. So we are writing down, in advance, what counts as success, because a market that only looks successful is a market that has failed.

Not a photo opportunity

There is a version of this that is easy: invite traders, take photographs of a busy hall, post the pictures, call it a success. The test is not whether the room looked full. The test is whether a vendor who came from across the district went home with more money than they would have earned selling the same goods alone, and whether that money was theirs to keep.

The five things it must show

1. Vendors keep the margin. If a trader sells at the market and less money reaches them than the same sale would have made alone, we have built a toll booth, not a market.
2. The buyers are real. A market funded only by our own money and our own volunteers is a demonstration, not a market. We will say which it was.
3. Traders come back. The honest measure is whether the same vendors return, unprompted, because it was worth their while.
4. Nobody is exploited to make it work. Unpaid work, borrowed money, or pressure on vendors to buy stock for the event are all failures wearing a success's clothes.
5. It could run again. One good day is a good day. A model that only works when a founder is standing in it is not a programme.

How we will judge it

We will publish vendor earnings before and after, we will be explicit about who funded the event and who attended, and we will record what went wrong as prominently as what went right. If the pilot does not prove these five things, we will say so and change the model rather than quietly restage it.

Where the pilot stands

About the programme