The community garden experience < our experience

COMMUNITY GARDENS TAKE ON SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION

by Russ Grayson

This story was first published in ABC Organic Gardener magazine, winter 2007.

Bendigo, Noosa, Adelaide and Melbourne – for four years now members and allies of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network have come together to discuss, diagnose and plan community food gardening in Australia’s cities and towns. Each year, attendance has grown and has attracted an increasingly wider range of people, from citizen-gardeners to local and state government staff, community and health workers, nutritionists and horticulturists.

What has become apparent is that, while most community gardeners simply want to grow food and spend time with each other, a growing number aim to set up their gardens as sustainability education centres, whether that means offering occasional workshops to the public on compost making and garden construction or something on a more ambitious scale such as undertaken by Brisbane’s Northey Street City Farm, NSW’s Macarthur Centre for Sustainable Living or Melbourne’s CERES and Collingwood Children’s Farm. These organizations offer not only community gardening and a community education program, but cultural and seasonal festivals, school’s programs and training in the Permaculture design system.

According to commentators such as local food advocate, Helena Norberg-Hodge and David Holmgren, who co-developed the Permaculture design system with Dr Bill Mollison, city farms and community gardens have a vital role to play in the relocalisation process that many see as necessary to adapting to a peak oil and global warming future. Their role in urban agriculture and community building is increasingly vital to sustainable urban futures.

From a small meeting at the Randwick Community Centre in 1994, the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network - originally set up by Dr Darren Phillips (now a Tasmanian resident) - has grown into a national organization that has formed alliances with organisations like the Sydney and Illawarra food fairness alliances, that consults with local government on establishing community gardens and acts as an information source for the media.  Many community gardeners also work in school food gardens and in programs such as Cultivating Community’s Edible Classroom garden-to-kitchen program.

Sustainability education... at the Macarthur Centre for Sustainable Living

Community gardeners at Macarthur Centre for Sustainable Living

No-dig gardening workshop... sustainability educators Kethy Giunta (left) demonstrates while Lizzie Rose (right) performs

Learning about ecology - school children dip net in the Centre's water storage. The Centre has a broad learning program for schools.

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PAGE UPDATED... Wednesday, 6 June 2007