To kick off the project, I met with Emily Jubenvill of the Vancouver Public Space Network this morning. We discussed our goals for the month, and how each of us could feed off of each others' work. She told me a bit about what VSPN is up to this month.
-submitted a proposal for a new community garden
-putting together a community garden tour
-working with a community garden in the West end and the Kerrisdale community garden
-they would like to develop a newsletter about what's going on in Vancouver urban agriculture
In relation to these, I can be helpful with the community garden tour, by visiting some of the gardens we want to get involved and possibly helping put together the map they will need. I can also help with the newsletter, by writing, laying it out, collecting images or making graphics.
We also spoke about what can be done to help new gardens get started. Some of the problems we identified:
-Land: finding it, getting it and keeping it
-Water: costs of hooking up
-Bureaucracy: applies to both land and water, as well as getting approval for a variety of other things
-Parks board applications: applies to both land and water- there seems to be a gap in communication between the parks board and community gardeners
-Fragmentation of the movement as a whole: there are a lot of people involved or interested in the movement. If they were more connected, they would have more force.
So what will I be doing to help improve these problems?
1) Research
-contacting influential members of the gardening community, people who work for the city, people who work for the parks board, and hearing more perspectives on the issues.
-learning about alternative solutions to dealing with bureaucracy, like building water collection units
2)Connection
-getting the information I collect to the right people, either through the VSPN newsletter, posters at community gardens, the vancouverurbanagriculture website etc.
-setting up some kind of meetup event. this will require talking to the Vancouver Urban Agriculture Network first, to see if they're interested.
A focus for the project will be finding ways to connect people using technology, but then getting them to step out of their houses and show physical support.
It sounds like there are two sorts of end users that you're trying to target:
ReplyDelete+ he who wants to get started with urban agriculture but doesn't know where or how.
+ and she who has a garden but no-one to farm it.
A similar service is provided by entities that try to connect employees with employers. Such as http://volweb.ca/volweb/
*nods* Definitely. There are also different kinds of groups that are in need of more input (policy-based groups like VUAN, for example.) Not just community gardens- there is the Vancouver Fruit Tree project, projects which aim to educate students, etc. There is a lot that one can do if interested in Urban Ag in Vancouver- the major problem seems to be getting involved. Even major groups like VUAN have very little web-presence. I'll be working more on that- see my next post about the meeting last night:)
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