This week, the lovely Kathy Finigan from My Productive Backyard blog, has taken the time out to share her opinion and insight into the role of community gardens in upskilling and motivating their communities in food production.
My Productive Backyard is a horticultural consultancy service dedicated to helping and inspiring people and organisations to learn, practice, and pass on the skills necessary to produce healthy, nutritious, organic food in a sustainable way.
In recent research conducted by the Australian Institute it estimated that 52% of Australian households participate in some form of food production and a further 13% would like to. However they also discovered that the turnover rate of people participating in home food production is high with most of the 52% only having been engage in home food production for less than 5 years.
In my experience with teaching community groups, it is often the lack of knowledge, which leads to disappointing results that then leads people to “give up” growing their own food.
Also most people need to have some form of external, ongoing motivation to keep them engaged. This may be as simple as a sms saying “great time to get your onions in this week” or a monthly workshop on what is happening in the garden this month.
The percentage of the population surveyed, not participating in food production cited lack of space and lack of time as the two main reasons for non-engagement. However the researcher indicated that from the statistics collected that this was a perceived perception rather than reality.
So how, as a community can we increase participation in food production and increase the amount of production per household.
I have just given a presentation at the Right to food coalitions conference on Putting food on the table, on a program I have developed called Share and Grow, which uses peer education and social media as a way to increase participation and production, but I can also see community gardens playing a vital role in achieving these goals.
With the demise of the local nursery I can see the local community garden becoming a centre of learning and motivation for local home food producers as well as supplying access to locally grown plants and other products, such as compost, which have been produced by the volunteers. This would make Community gardens self-sustaining which is necessary in they are to continue after government grants or local government support has ceased.
To give you an example of how I could see this working.
I recently presented a workshop on integrated pest control and part of the presentation was on attracting beneficial insects to your garden.
There were a number of people from a local community garden in attendance, and we got talking about the potential for community engagement and community garden sustainability and come up with a plan to run a short workshop on attracting beneficial insects to your garden.
The workshop would be advertised heavily in the local community, put on at a time when people are available, have a corresponding kid’s activity going at the same time and would supply morning tea to increase the social inclusion potential.
You would have to charge participants to cover the presenter’s costs (we were looking at $20.00 ahead).
We also looked at the potential of having, on sale, packages of insect attracting herbs and flowers, both plants and seeds, both produced by volunteers at the community garden.
Then engaging with local men’s shed to build attractive little insectaries which could also be sold on the day.
This gives the Community garden an income to develop and deliver further engagement type activities to ensure ongoing interest and enthusiasm in the community garden, but which would also flow onto home food production.
In order for a community garden to become the hub of the communities’ food production they must:
- Encourage more people to become involved.
- Have some method of ensuring there is a constant roll over of governance to avoid burn out waning of enthusiasm.
- Be Welcoming of everyone.
- Non-judgemental.
- Tolerant of people’s different gardening philosophies, but with good governance guidelines for how things are down to reduce conflict.
- Develop at range of communication strategies to inform everyone what is happening. This is so people don’t feel left out, ie notices, flyers, emails, SMS etc.
- Have open days to encourage wider community to come and have a look at their local community garden.
- Provide morning tea, lunch or afternoon tea to encourage social interactions and knowledge sharing.
- Run weekly /monthly workshops that are of interest to the wider community, survey community to see what they want to learn.
- Encourage local children to participate- research has proven that if children are interested in food production their parent will engage as well- run holiday workshops, always have child friendly activities on open days, have corresponding kids’ activities when holding adult activities. Always make the children feel welcome.
There is a need to develop the local community garden as the “One stop shop” for their local communities. Where people can come and participate in activities, learn and share knowledge, maintain motivation for food production, buy or swap seeds, buy plants, compost and other garden products.
With this model, community and home food production would become an accepted integral part of everyone’s lives.
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