The Our Food Project: Reconnecting Food and Community
The Our Food: Reconnecting Food and Community Project is a four year project made possible by the generous funding of the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
The overarching goal of the Our Food Project is to strengthen communities' relationship to food by helping to build what we call ‘positive food environments’. Positive food environments are the physical and social spaces that help to normalize healthy eating by making it easier to grow, sell, and eat good food. We work at the individual, community and systemic level to increase the availability of nutritious food as well as our access to it. In doing so, we actively involve people in the development of more localized food systems.
Many communities in Halifax struggle with food and income insecurity – while at the same time our farmers find it difficult to make a living. The Our Food Project believes that both small farmers and low-income communities have the right to adequate income and an equitable food system. For this reason we’re helping to connect at risk communities to healthy food sources. By supporting local producers, educating eaters, and advocating for food policy change, we believe we can help to create a more equitable and sustainable food system.
Our areas of focus include:
- Food and Garden Skills Education
- Infrastructure and Capacity Building.
- Policy Change and Civic Engagement.
- Story-telling, Research and Evaluation.
We offer support in a range of ways from building garden infrastructure, running food and garden skills workshops, building capacity and leadership amongst residents and staff, increasing the number of farmers’ markets and CSA drop-offs, story-telling, program evaluation, civic engagement and advocacy.
Watch the Our Food video below!
The Past, Present and Future of Our Food:
The work that has become the Our Food Project was born out of the initiatives that were formerly known as “Food Connections” and the “Urban Garden Project”. In an effort to streamline our approach and implementation we have collapsed these projects into what we now call ‘Our Food’. We currently have staff in Halifax and Cumberland County, with plans to expand our work into targeted regions in Cape Breton and New Brunswick over the coming four years. Through these efforts, we aim to build stronger more equitable local food systems, bridging urban and rural locales, and strengthening regionals ties within the local food movement.
Do you have a community food project and are looking for support? Here are some of the ways we may be able to help:
- Workshops: education and skills building to grow, prepare and share good food
- Support with new building projects: garden beds and greenhouses, root cellars, rainwater catchment, composting systems, etc.
- Consultation and support for launching a community food project in your neighbourhood
- Training and support for staff and community residents
- Advice on helping to implement good food polices and initiatives.
Funding for this project has been provided by the Public Health Agency Of Canada (PHAC). The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the PHAC).