Sustainable
Communities Through Kai Project – Gathering Stories
As proposed at our network gathering at the end of 2012 I am
planning to visit some schools within the project between Wednesday 10th April and Friday 12th April.
Purpose:
- To meet with some of the participating schools;
- To learn more about the current situation and how you are "taking the next steps" with the Sustainable Communities through kai project.
- To trial gathering ‘stories’ about the project to date.
If you would like a visit and could host us within the
proposed timetable please contact either Robyn or myself.
We are hoping that everyone will be able to come to the
Waikato Enviroschools networking event on Thursday afternoon at the Grandview
community gardens. We will be looking at exploring
alternatives which hopefully is the phase that you are moving into.
Exploring
Alternatives
I always think that exploring alternatives and possibilities
is great fun. You get to leave behind all the stereotypes and shackles of
conventional thinking and live out the creativity of the green hat. You also get to oh
and ah over what other groups are
doing and become more analytical in your own practice and consider what holds
us back?
At our first hui at the Hamilton Gardens we alighted upon
the phrase live, learn and earn in our
own community. This came from the Stephen Ritz and Green Bronx Machine TEDx talk.
As you move towards exploring
alternatives in the project perhaps you can keep this question to the fore:
What are the
possibilities through our project to enable people to live, learn and earn in
our community?
What might that look like?
Pick a scenario below and discuss with students or with
colleagues:
How would people in
these situations be living, learning and earning in their communities?
If you were part of
this food community how would it influence how you eat and what you eat?
Sustainable
Communities Through Kai
As part of a
sustainable community - scenarios from exploring alternatives
·
Individual gardens that target some part of the
food supply to share with others e.g. onions to share with someone else’s
tomatoes, olives for walnuts, mandarins for feijoas etc. Extension of the swap
table idea, but being strategic and planning with a group of people to meet a
range of needs.
·
Sharing in a commercial kitchen to preserve
harvest excess – someone donates time, someone the ingredients, someone the
clean up, someone a monetary contribution for ingredients that can’t be grown.
Then a big shared harvest festival meal to celebrate and take home the goodies!
·
Putting aside some part of the weekly food bill
to contribute to someone’s wages to do the ‘gardening’ either in individual
homes in a street or in a community space.
·
Community garden network where individuals
contribute some part of the work flow to enable a regular food supply, excess
might be sold to the local market to enable a paid Coordinator.
·
A cooperative orchard, nut grove, olive grove
where participants pay into the development some up-keep and the distribution
of money obtained from sales enables families to purchase food from the market.
·
A big potato patch in a shared space where the
harvest is shared between participants and for older members of the community
who aren’t able to do heavy gardening, or young families who are pressed for
time.
·
Inform others - be part of establishing an
internet network of where to find the good food locally see an example on http://www.localharvest.org/ and work
with people in your community to create a community food map that enables
people to access good food.
·
Allow plants to grow that would naturally grow
rather than cultivating space. What could be easier and cheaper than harvesting
what nature provides? Learn from our elders how these plants were once part of
our diet and how we can cook and eat them. See this link to a talk about what
we perceive as weeds are actually great sources of food! http://tedxmanhattan.org/2013-talks/
scroll down until you find Tama Matsuoka Wong she is a delightful food forager
who speaks really well about connecting many Enviroschools concepts to the way
that she lives with her family.
Add your own scenarios that you and your students are
working on that we can learn from too.
