-
-
ACFCGN annual conference 2007 presentations available
-
The conference audio and presentations (keynote’s only) are now available for download from the CERES website: http://www.ceres.org.au/community/conference.htm
-
MEDIA RELEASE...
The following media release was issues on 13 November 2007.
Download pdf file of release.
Labor's school garden plan needs rethinking
Labor risks perpetuating a single model in promising to expand the number of schools with kitchen garden programs. In failing to consult with organisations already engaged in the educational use of school gardens, Labor risks implementing an expenside model.
Labor has promised to fund an expansion of The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden programs with a total allocation of $12.8 million over four years. The programs, which educate students in growing, processing and cooking food produced in school gardens, are seen as a tactic in the national campaign to improve the diets of children and reduce the epidemic of childhood obesity.
“We applaud Labor for making this commitment and acknowledge the good work the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation (SAKGF) has done to put school gardens on the map”, said Ben Neil, CEO of Cultivating Community.
“However, we feel that each school should be able to decide which model best fits its capacity and not have a rigid structure imposed on it.”
Cultivating Community, an associate of the national organisation, the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, has trialed a successful kitchen garden project with SAKGF at Collingwood College, in Melbourne, and is assisting other schools develop similar projects.
“It is odd that the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network has not been consulted by Labor, considering it is the only organisation to have held national conferences on school kitchen gardens in Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne”.
There are a number of organisations able to assist schools to develop food gardens, instigate healthy food programs and integrate activities into the curriculum at a fraction of the cost of the SAKGF model. Added to this is the lost opportunity to incorporate environmental education within the SAKGF approach.
“Labor would do well to carefully consider the different models of delivering school garden education programs, their costs, affordability and effectiveness rather than leap in with just a single structure. We would like the opportunity to discuss this further with the ALP”, said Mr Neil.
One size doesn’t fit all
“Will the schools have to follow the strict Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden approach?”, asked Mr Neil. “Cultivating Community’s experience has shown that one model does not fit all and that many students would miss out on the kitchen garden experience because their schools would not have the capacity or space to develop the SAKGF model.
“There are a number of Melbourne schools such as Kings Patch, Fitzroy Primary and St Peters primary that are good examples of school garden programs that are flexible and that meet the needs of individual schools.”
In other states, East Perth City Farm in Western Australia and Growing Communities in Brisbane already provide schools with edible garden services, however Labor has failed to contact them. In Sydney, Randwick City Council assists schools in the municipality with its Sustainable Schools Initiative and on the NSW South Coast, CareDesign is supported by local industry to deliver a schools garden program.
The idea of using food gardens in schools for educational purposes was pioneered in Australia by now-retired Brisbane teacher, Carolyn Nuttall, author of the book, The Children’s Food Forest. It was further popularised by a 1995 course at Adelaide’s Black Forest Primary School food garden/outdoor classroom (started 25 years ago) by New Zealander, Robina McCurdy.
More information:
CULTIVATING COMMUNITY
Ben Neil, Chief Executive Officer, Cultivating Community
P.O. Box 8 Abbotsford, Victoria 3067
Office: 03 9415 6580
Fax: 03 9415 6507
Mobile: 0404 255 317
www.cultivatingcommunity.org.au
AUSTRALIAN CITY FARMS AND COMMUNITY GARDENS NETWORK
Russ Grayson, Communications
0414 065 203
info@pacific-edge.info
www.communitygarden.org.au
Great speakers, great company, great food, great conviviality...
-
the ACFCGN annual conference 2007
...an unofficial report by Russ Grayson
MARCH IN MELBOURNE is a meteorologically confused time. One day, it's hot and sticky - T-shirt weather. The next, it's cold and windy - jackets are the order of the day. Then the rain comes, not in any great downpour but in sporadic showers, for this is a city in drought.
There's some indefinable quality about this southern metropolis that makes it a more... how do I put it?... a more humane city than its bigger, brasher cousin to the north. It's easier to move around, something enhanced by its frequent tram services and the long main roads that take you on long, long journeys through the suburbs. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne is not a city fractured by harbours, ridges and valleys.
This is the city that, late in March this year, hosted the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network (ACFCGN) national conference. This was the fourth such event. The others - the first in Bendigo's wet cold, then in the sticky heat of the Sunshine Coast and, last year, in Adelaide’s dry heat - were more internally focused. The Melbourne ACFCGN crew - in the guise of Cultivating Community and other supporters - thought that something more ambitious was in order. And they delivered.
Ambitious, successful, well attended and inspring
People came from all states - and, yes, that includes those well away from the eastern seaboard - WA, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory. There were two from Christchurch, though I do not list them as coming from other states because New Zealanders get a bit touchy about that. Those two came from the Christchurch Community Gardens Association in that pleasant, flat, windy and sometimes freezing city.
Victoria's Minister for Housing, Richard Wynne, opened the conference which was held in the somewhat ornate but faded Victorian (the period of history, not the state) opulence of Collingwood Town Hall. There, a changing audience numbering in the hundreds gathered to listed to speakers such as David Holmgren, co-founder of the Permaculture design system; international relocalisation and local food advocate, Helena Norberg-Hodge; gardener and author, Jackie French; ABC television's gardener, Jerry Coleby-Williams; Indian campaigner and author, Vandana Shiva; the UK Federation of City Farm's Mike Marston and others.
-
Given that the themes of the different days - school gardens and education, community gardening, seed saving (it was the Seed Savers' Network's annual conference) and food security - attracted the same core of attendees but a differing peripheral audience, number in attendance may have been higher in total than that of the best-attended day.
Ian's new book
Permaculture educator and ex-South Australia resident, Ian Lillington, launched his new book - The Holistic Life - Sustainability Through Permaculture - at the conference.
The volume is a welcome addition to the design system's library of titles. Ian speaks of how and why he became involved in the design system and how he used its principles to design and build his earth construction house at Willunga, South Australia.
Ian and family now live in Victoria where he is involved in training in the accredited Permaculture training courses.
Speakers inform, influence and inspire
David Holmgren spoke of a " ...design system coming from Permaculture to look at food security in this world of less energy". Permaculture remains relevant, he said, because "it is about people and food, about connection with nature, tools and community".
David's mention of 'tools' struck me as interesting. It reminded me of Stewart Brand and Harold Rheingold's Whole Earth Catalog of the 1970s, which focused on access to tools for self-reliant living for the 'back to the land' or 'alternatives' movement which influenced Permaculture, which emerged later that decade. Just as successive editions of the Catalog made tools accessible and developed a network around itself, so too, I thought, does the sustainability movement and Permaculture (often the same thing) bring new tools for thinking, sharing information and acting on the world.
David sees Permaculture having entered a "new wave" in the new century and spoke of how localisation is the way forward, bringing with it the development of local food economies. As with global warming, ideas spread, he said, and " ...can change things quickly". If the awakening of the last five or six years continues, David suggested, it could lead to policy change.
This, too, is an interesting point worthy of a little thought. I don't know if anyone has documented the change in public attitude over that short period, but it seems that global warming, the potential peaking of the oil supply and other topics have come to a maturity as political issues in the past five to six years. Sure, they were there in the 1990s but not with the political presence they now command. For sustainabiliity advocates - and that includes Permaculture people - the question is about how we respond to that change and seek to influence public perceptions and political policies.
David went on to say that, "The global to local message is profoundly empowering", and that it links the local food movement to sustainability and the "economics of happiness".
Relocalisation the opportunity, says Helena
The economics of happiness was also a theme of another keynote speaker who has long been an advocate of local food systems in the UK and Australia, Helena-Norberg Hodge (author, Ancient Futures; co-author Bringing the Food Economy Home). After three decades of educating, campaigning, writing and developing new components of relocalisation (Helena was influential in the establishment of Byron Bay's weekly farmers' market) she come to the conclusion that "the emerging relocalisation movement" can influence public opinion and shape government policy.
"The economics of happiness, with the cultivation of community cultures of place, are essential to combating terrorism. The consumer monoculture destroys biodiversity and people's self-respect", she told an enthralled audience.
Global communications enables carbon-free speakers
In keeping with the carbon-neutral objectives of the conference, Vendana Shiva spoke from Delhi by audio link and the UK Federation of City Farm's Mike Marsden appeared "from the snowy northern UK" on a large screen via video phone, his talk illustrated by a synchronised Powerpoint presentation projected on an adjacent screen.
If the world chooses a reduced-carbon pathway with less international travel and if we are to retain effective global communications, then such technologies will have to become better developed and commonplace as well as cheap, very reliable and ported to handheld devices such as mobile phones. Their use at the conference may thus turn out to be a harbinger of the future and the conference organisers are to be congratulated in deploying these new technologies rather than flying overseas speakers to Melbourne.
Workshops - too many to attend
There were workshops aplenty.
Su Dennet from Melliodora, not far from Melbourne at Hepburn Springs, gave a succinct run down on the many different ways of improving food security at home - preserving, bottling, drying and so on. Understandably for a conference in which food was a theme, the workshop was packed.
-
Su Dennet from Melliodora, not far from Melbourne at Hepburn Springs, gave a succinct run down on the many different ways of improving food security at home - preserving, bottling, drying and so on. Understandably for a conference in which food was a theme, the workshop was packed.
The Illawarra and Sydney food fairness alliances teamed up with Wollongong City Council's sustainability educator, Vanessa John, to explain their missions and activities. Council employs a staffer to focus on food security in the region.
The enviable record of Cultivating Community
Cultivating Community CEO, Ben Neil, described how the work of the association has grown to include 20 community gardens, two food cooperatives in low income areas and the school-based garden-to-kitchen program.
Cultivating Community, the Victorian end of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network, employs a number of people to work in assisting public housing residents develop community gardens for local food production on their estates. They also assist non-estate community gardeners and were involved in the Collingwood College school-garden-to-kitchen program with local chef and author, Stephanie Alexander. Cultivating Community is now developing its own school-garden-to-kitchen program in which students grow, harvest, prepare, cook and eat the food they grow at school.
Tours to inspire
Tours offered the choice of visiting either school or community gardens.
Evident was the high productivity and good order of the public housing estate community gardens supported by Cultivating Community, gardens which are farmed mainly by immigrant peoples.
Oh, yes - the food, the places, the people
Let me tell you how good and inspiring the annual CERES Harvest Festival was on Sunday, the last event of the week. There, I met the CERES Food Project crew and was rewarded with home made baklava and dalmados just for taking their photo for Community Harvest - the journal of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network (download pdf file from: www.communitygarden.org.au).
I sampled a home made red brewed by an Italian gardener from grapes grown in the CERES community garden and enjoyed a rather filling Harvest Festival feast featuring foods representative of the ethnically-diverse people who come into CERES. Conspicuous were the Seed Savers’ Network’s Jude and Michel Fanton, buzzing around pointing their camera at anything interesting as they set out on their new careers as video producers.
And let's not forget the sumptuous morning and afternoon teas and lunches prepared by different caterers each day, and the conference dinner at Lentil as Anything, adjacent to Collingwood Children's Farm. Lots of varied food and no fixed prices - you pay what you think the food is worth. Yes, a café run on trust.
There was also the conviviality of impromptu meals at places such as the Vege Bar in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, with the crew from the Illawarra - including Dan Deighton and his wild bunch of school and community garden designer-builders.
-
Melbourne Slow Food people were there too, and they came on the bus tour of community food gardens. After the tours, we finished the conference on Saturday night with a party at Veg Out Community Garden in St Kilda, an exuberant place that combines food production (including cooking in the big earth oven they built), the works of gardener-artists dotted through the allotments and the conviviality of good company. Unfortunately, they had none left of the crisp vintage they bottle under the Veg Out label, made partly from grapes grown in the garden and with the support of a friendly Yarra Valley vigneron.
So, we learned about food security in the southern capital - it appears to be not all that different a situation to Sydney - we learned about the excellent work of Cultivating Community, saw incredibly productive community gardens, heard people's inspiring stories and realised what an incredibly capable, clever, insightful, imaginative and convivial bunch of people make up the food security/urban agriculture/school food gardens milieu.
And the lessons?
Now, what can we - as a national, urban garden-agriculture and sustainability education network - learn from this latest of our conferences?
Capability - high and growing
The first learning is this: The ACFCGN now has the capacity to organise high profile, ambitious events that attract people from all over Australia and beyond. Our capacity has grown significantly since the first national networking conference in Bendigo only a few years ago and the Network is capable of attracting the attention of state government politicians and national media (ABC Radio National and ABC radio Darwin during the conference).
The growth of the Network's influence and reach is significant.
Productive association the key to strength
The ACFCGN's strength is, in part, due to the diversity of those that make it up. As a network rather than an organisation promoting a single practice, the Network brings into productive association people working in community gardening, food security, sustainability education, Permaculture, local government, various government agencies, community workers, food advocates, educators and horticulturists.
It is because none of these sectors seek to dominate or exert undue influence through the Network that they are successful in finding ways to work together in a productive matrix of action.
Community gardens and city farms - meeting real needs
Community gardens and city farms are meeting the real needs of people for fresh food (though they can, of course, grow only a limited portion of a family's food needs), for human company and friendship, for developing a sense of place and community. That much was evident in the gardens visited and among the conference audience.
With community development workers making use of the gardens, local and state governments supporting them and the increasing number of gardens appearing in our suburbs, it appears that community garden-agriculture is an idea whose time has come.
Community gardens - a focus for sustainability eduation
With ACFCGN associate organisations like CERES, Collingwood Children's Farm, Northey Street City Farm and Macarthur Centre for Sustainable Living all working in sustainability education, it is clear that such places are among the main sites for education and the demonstration of the innovative, sustainability ideas that we need to move forward with confidence into a future challenged by global warming, peak oil and social issues.
The majority of community gardeners want little more than to produce food and a sense of place and community, however a smaller number are taking on a broader role in sustainability education. This has grown into a major activity strand within the urban garden-agriculture movement these past few years and it varies in scale from modest workshops in how to compost and make no-dig gardens to the school's programs and public workshops and courses of Northey Street, Collingwood Children's Farm, CERES and others.
As part of this trend, places like Northey Street City Farm have directly integrated Permaculture education - including the nationally accredited certificate courses - into its program of activities. Northey Street has now become an important Permaculture education centre. The IMBY project in Albury-Wodonga is set to do the same.
Return
We have now returned to our cities and towns, many of us inspired with the people, places and ideas we met this changeable Autumn in Melbourne.
So, let's keep the contact we made in that city... whatever your project in community gardening, food security, sustainability education and more, the Australian City Farm & Community Gardens Network's website - www.communitygarden.org.au - is there for you to place your stories.
And thanks, Cultivating Community and its associates, for organising a great conference, great food, great company and great ideas.
-
The ACFCGN's strength is, in part, due to the diversity of those that make it up. As a network rather than an organisation promoting a single practice, the Network brings into productive association people working in community gardening,
Russ Grayson. March 2007
< top
-
PAGE UPDATED... Monday, 12 November 2007
