In their successful application to the 2023 Permafund grant round, Anam Cara House in the Australian town of Colac, Victoria, described its main purpose as “To provide the South West Victorian community with excellence in respite and end of life care within a home-like environment; embracing respect and compassion for all people.”
They explained “We operate a day hospice program, 4 days a week. There are many participants who have a life-long love of the outdoors and gardening so we often do outdoor garden activities with them.
Day respite at the hospice provides a vital break for carers and gives the participants opportunities to enjoy different activities and socialise.”
Anam Cara House described their project as “Permaculture gardening - a community and social experience for people with a chronic life limiting illness. Our aim is to develop an existing site on the hospice grounds with raised wicking garden beds for food production. The food grown will supply our kitchen for homemade meals for our guests.”
The Permafund management team has been receiving regular progress reports from the Community Liaison Nurse, Naomi Lettieri.
“Our permaculture garden project is going along well. We have planned out the space and identified the size of the raised garden beds and the required space around the beds so someone in a wheelchair can move around the space. Initially we had planned to use a different site, but after meeting and considering our best options, we are positioning the garden beds in a location closer to the hospice building.
Our respite guests and maintenance team have been consulted on the plans. We have identified what items we already have that can be recycled or repurposed for the activity to start. We have ordered our garden beds to be made by a local tradesperson, using recycled, untreated cypress timber with a food grade wicking lining.
Everyone is excited about this project and we are talking to local businesses about how they can support us with some of the components as donations, such as gravel for fill, sand and soil.
“The excavation will be done as a working bee with volunteer support. We have the site preparation well underway, the garden beds with the lining are on site. We are hopeful to be ready for spring planting.” Our Thursday day respite participants have been involved in the decision making and planning. Our maintenance team and volunteers have been assisting with the groundwork. We are excited to see the project develop to get the garden beds in place and growing food for the hospice kitchen. “
Once the new garden beds were set up Naomi reported “We are delighted to let you know that we planted out the wonderful wicking garden beds with some of our day respite participants 2 weeks ago.
The participants really enjoyed the experience, and the plants are already growing well.
It will be a great activity as time goes by as the gardens become well established." Anam Cara House, Colac, Victoria will continue to share reports about the impact of this project.
Thanks to the build up of donations from individuals, businesses and groups throughout each year the Permafund management committee is able to regularly launch a grant round.
Applications to Permafund for funding for environmental and permaculture education projects are received from a wide variety of community organisations both in Australia and regions around the world -from the Pacific to Asia, Africa to the Americas.
Donations and tithes from individuals and businesses to Permaculture Australia’s Permafund are warmly welcomed with amounts over $2.00 tax deductible in Australia.
Funds raised by community events such as Open Garden days, social gatherings, workshops and festivals provide wonderful support for Permafund’s grant program.
Contributions to the Permafund can be made here via PayPal or direct deposit. Thanks to everyone for your support.
In the 2018-19 Permafund micro-grant round an application by Faulu Productions to establish a permaculture food production system in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya was supported with AU$2,000 to help combat malnutrition in the camp.
Faulu Productions is an organisation that consists of refugees, volunteers and supporters from all around the world. Their mission is to promote agriculture and education, to help create a safe, sustainable living for refugees and to empower them to improve their lifestyles.
The project has established a multi-site permaculture system with 200 participants establishing 5 by 10 metre garden plots in their own compounds and contributing to the maintenance of the larger Kakuma community garden and central Turkana permaculture community gardens.
Preparing garden beds for seeds
The gardens are modeled on natural ecosystems combining ecological, engineering and environmental principles. The designs have used integrated natural water resource management systems and sustainable architecture, so the project is self-maintaining, regenerative and an ongoing source of fresh produce and biomass.
Newly planted beds and maturing crops
The objective has been to help the refugees to become self-sufficient. The key component of the plan was water conservation with an investment in water storage (40 water tanks to harvest 2,000 litres). Digging tools and bulk seeds were purchased and watering cans to help prevent splash erosion and the destruction of young seedlings.
Preparing the harvest for sharing
The participating workers have been resourceful collecting mulch materials and manures and contributing earth building skills.
Making mud bricks for house construction
Trees were planted in the gardens for shade, erosion protection and to provide chop and drop material to assist with mulching & soil creation.
With no “qualified” experts inside the camp the participants are using YouTube to learn the practical skills of permaculture, including watching videos by Australian experts including Geoff Lawton and Morag Gamble.
This project is viewed on the ground as 100% sustainable because it has created job opportunities among refugees, improved the quality of the camp’s environment and helped improve community health and well being. More permaculture inspired enterprises and initiatives are being undertaken following this ground-breaking project.
The community appreciates all donations.
The Kakuma Refugee Camp suffers from regular, severe flooding, the most recent being in early February 2020. Houses have been destroyed and belongings and food washed away.
Flood damage to buildings
Continuing permaculture projects not only supply food and hope but also prevent erosion and washaways as trees and plants take root.
Newly planted gardens and maturing crops
Your generous donations to Permafund support this and other permaculture related projects in Australia and overseas and are very much appreciated.
Citizen-initiated food systems could get a funding boost if recommendations coming from a NSW state government proposal get a favourable reception by the environment minister and departmental decision makers.
The proposal comes from the work of consultants, Roz Hopkins Muller Enterprise, who carried out research into community food systems for the NSW Environment Trust, a quasi-independent operation of the Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH). The Trust administers an annual grant scheme open to community and educational organisations as well as local government, and has a focus on environmental improvement.
Community food systems the focus
The Trust launched the project to assess new funding opportunities for community food systems, and since its launch I have been a member of the advisory panel for the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA). Other advisory team members include Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network president, Jane Mowbray, the Royal Botanic Gardens Community Greening program assisting community food producers in social housing, local government, the UNSW Faculty of the Built Environment and others.
Any funding scheme eventually coming from the project will exclude food waste projects as that is already the focus of the state government’s Love Food Hate Waste program. It will also exclude assistance to food enterprises based on a business model, such as small, for-profit food businesses as well as not-for-profit social enterprises like community supported agriculture and food co-ops, as they are outside the terms of reference of community-based enterprises.
I tried to have social enterprise included as they are a distribution model with the social goal of access to good food, any operating excess going back into the enterprise rather than being distributed as profit, however my attempt was unsuccessful on account of their operating as businesses.
I accepted the invitation to participate on the panel as I believe this is where AFSA can do good work and influence outcomes. It might be behind-the-scenes type of work but that, rather than campaigning, is often where change can best be influenced because it allows us to focus less on what we would oppose and more on what we want to see happen.
The four community food systems likely to benefit include community gardening, food swaps, edible streetscaping and home gardening, which is growing food in home gardens for distribution via swapping or selling along the lines of the NSW Blue Mountain community enterprise, Crop & Swap.
The survey carried out by the consultants found that the main motivator for participation in community food gardens to be environmental improvement. Social interaction and access to good food also figured. Improving environments figured when I did research for a local government policy directions document some years ago, however the lead reason for participation I found to be access to good food followed by social interaction and learning.
Interestingly, the research found that participation in community gardening has increased the sharing of knowledge to a high degree among gardeners, significantly enlarged their social circles, dramatically increased the practice of composting food and green wastes (to produce garden fertiliser) and made many aware of the ‘food miles’ issue of transporting food over long distances.
Naming something ‘community’ does not automatically mean access, it was found. Access to community initiatives, like community food systems, is influenced by proximity, transportation and so on. It’s much like the realisation in the fair food movement with its criticism of Australia’s supermarket duopoly, that in some areas there is no alternative to the supermarket as a source of food, and what is needed are ideas on how to buy less-processed, more nutritious foods in the supermarkets.
Fragmentation
In identifying the existence of a social movement around community-produced food the researchers found it to be fragmented, with participants restricted to their ‘silos’ of community gardening and other areas. There is little cross-communication between the silos. I think this fragmentation is real, having seen it myself.
There are many reasons spanning a lack of time to share and communicate outside of the particular community food circle, a focus only on community gardening especially where gardeners are new and learning, a monofocus on home gardening without connection to other home gardeners or gardening organisations, a focus on localism that ignores the larger community food picture and of the social and political contexts the practice exists within.
What has come from the project — the research was national in scope — is the realisation that there is a significant community food movement but it lacks cohesive leadership.
One of the few moves in that direction comes from the national educational, advocacy and networking organisation, the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network. The Network has engaged in advocacy to protect the practice of community agriculture and has represented it in the media and in government. It is sectoral, though, focusing only on community growing, school gardens and closely related activity.
The national, Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance offers a broad representation to its diverse membership that includes farmers, food distributors, community gardeners and others, however it is not a leadership focusing specifically on the community food sector. There would likely be potential to assume such leadership were the Alliance to set up an initiative specifically to do that, much as it set up a farmers’ group — Fair Food Farmers United.
Any representative organisation that evolves to represent the nascent community food sector would necessarily include the commercial, social enterprise organisations that seek to fulfil social goals through a not-for-profit business model. Community supported agriculture schemes and food co-operatives are the dominant types of food social enterprise in Australia.
These are important parts of the broader community food system that focus on the distribution side of the urban food supply chain. They are important to those without time, inclination or opportunity to garden their food. Importantly, community supported agriculture enterprises like Brisbane Food Connect, Ooooby and CERES Fair Food in Melbourne link urban eaters directly to farmers in the region, developing through practical experience a regional food economy and giving practical expression to just what is local food.
It’s about volunteers
The community food sector, that around community gardening, food swaps, networked home gardeners distributing their produce beyond the back yard, and even the school food gardens that have become popular since first being developed and promoted in the 1990s by the permaculture design movement, is the work of volunteers.
These initiatives extend the great Australian tradition of voluntarism into food provisioning. While home gardening is an Australian tradition that was scaled up through the Gardens for Victory campaign during the Second World War, it is only since the first community garden was established in Melbourne in the late 1970s that food production has taken a sustained community focus.
The Environment Trust research disclosed what those involved in community organisations, especially those managing them, have known for years — voluntarism is a practice limited by volunteer time and skills. Researchers found that the number of good ideas offered by volunteers exceeds the capacity of voluntary organisations to implement them. Organisations relying on volunteers risk losing them when volunteers find their good ideas cannot be followed through because voluntary organisations don’t have the time, funds or capability to do so.
A member of the Woodbridge, Tasmania, community supported agriculture scheme with a box of fresh organic produce.
This raises the question of capacity, familiar to community organisations. It’s a well-worn word in the world of community organisations and NGOs and refers to the availability of time, skills, funds and inclination to get the job done. It’s accurate to say that it is the lack of capacity that limits the potential of voluntary organisations and even some NGOs with paid staff. The researchers have looked at ideas to extend the capacity of organisations, including that of educating members in running organisations.
There would be much to be done to improve to implement some of the ideas coming from the proposals. Local government approaches to edible streetscaping and planting edibles on public land is much in need of reform, including policy that covers regions larger than just local government areas. The idea of incentivising councils to develop more permissive and coherent policy came up.
Another topic raised was the undemocratic practice of councils in allowing vexatious individuals to block community initiatives even when more people support them than oppose. This, too, would require reform and democratising if community food initiatives are to be enabled. Although it wasn’t mentioned specifically, there is the associated potential for precinct committees, where they exist, to block community food initiatives. Critics say that precinct committees often devolve into cliques of NIMBYs — the conservative Not In My back Yard crew who seek to control what is done on public land and who can limit the opportunity for innovative new landuses.
In some ways food is a safe area for government to venture into, however it is also a conflicted area with its own politics. That politics reflects the makeup of the movement and touches upon food security and poverty, the market dominance of the supermarket duopoly, farming systems, urban landuse and local government, the GMO issue and government policy. Discussion among the advisory panel was about how the Environment Trust scheme, if it eventuates, would represent not the campaigning side of food politics but those organisations actively building the community-based food systems as the fair food future they want to see.
That a state government body has taken the initiative to commission research on, and bring together an advisory panel of community food systems signifies that the practice has moved from the innovative urban fringe into the social mainstream. Now, we wait to see what comes from the government and minister’s office.
You must be logged in to post a comment.