It’s been quite a month. We held our most recent Slow Food event and completed a course of action for building the raised beds at our two housing sites. All these things were expected and lined up, in order, in the tidy bullet points of our Original Green Community Food Plan.
One of the goals of the Community Food Plan is to provide job training for low-income residents, in garden development and construction. Teaching people to build and maintain gardens has been considered a “down-the-road-when-other-parts-of-the-plan-are-firmly-established” kind of goal. Well, it’s just like a plan to go and unplan itself…we are about to implement that piece, building our first raised beds on non-low-income housing, private property.
You might remember that one of our ongoing objectives is to develop linked, growing sites, at the neighborhood level. Included in that work is encouraging a commitment to sharing, cooperation, community raising, resilience, and empathy among other things. We’ve definitely been doing the latter, in an intangible way, through our quarterly face-to-face Slow Food events. But our long-range plan has always included doing so on a more tangible level of food sharing across communities. This means placing growing sites not just in low-income developments, but other private homes, too. So, in the spirit of unplanning we engaged our first client, to shape a training program and further cement our commitment to promoting community sharing.
We’ll now install raised beds at a significantly lower cost to the property owner, in exchange for a commitment to sharing any produce overages and ultimately being included in our overall distribution system. Now, the task is to complete the actual sharing strategy. Yes, it was also down the list on our bullet-pointed, perfect list, but sometimes things just happen…
home&community inc 