posted 1 week ago
I have friend that runs food pantry out of a church.
She is very good at what she does and very focused on feeding people.
She has asked my wife and I to be her garden managers.
This seems like something too large for us to do by ourselves but we know a lot of people with similar interests and values.
I just attended the Hamilton County Urban Food Systems Convening:
"The Hamilton County Urban Food Systems is a gathering of those working in the urban agriculture network in Hamilton County. The event is designed to begin addressing food access and food apartheid in Hamilton County, Ohio by bringing together key players in the farm to table food cycle with a focus on support urban farms and community gardens.
The sectors that will be represented at the Convening are:
Urban Farmers
Community Garden Leaders
Government and Policy Organizations
Education Organizations
Food Distributors (Farmer's Markets, Food Pantries, Small Grocers)"
It was amazing, and presented me with many leads on what to do next.
A lot of us had friends in common, and we made new connections.
I have people offering to write grants for us, people who need plumbing and electrical help , and people who are excited and ready to make things happen in our local food scene.
One of the things we concluded in the community garden managers breakout group was the need for a digital forum just for us.
Each of us had bad experiences on social media pages
I cited my experience here on Permies as the gold standard.
We are looking at Discord, and I'm going to look at Slack, but it just has to work as a place to share our specialized resources.
Fnding ways to create secure year round employment for agricultural workers in this space is another goal we agreed on.
Many people I met today use winter season to write grant proposals, but even if that is/was a reliable sustainable system, it doesn't keep workers employed during that time.
This lead us to another goal, a robust local food infrastructure.
I met a woman from the City of Cincinnati office of Environment And Sustainability who is eager to write grants for local food organizations.
That's infrastructure!
I found out that our local Tool Bank has walk behind tractors for rent: infrastructure!
We have an established gleaners organization and we have an existing organization that turns raw surplus food into finished meals: infrastructure!
We seem to have everything we need, if only we can get these things connected to one another.
The only physical infrastructure that no one seemed to already have was cold storage space, but even that might yet be found.
So the last thing we agreed to do was to contribute to an local foods data base , and we have sponsors at both the local and county government level who will maintain it.
It's a great start
If you are local and interested, hit me up here in this thread or dm me.
I want to activate this local network of like minded people.
I am terrible at finishing my own projects, but obligation empowers me.
I intend to see pantry appropriate crops on this land come spring.
