Course highlights community-focused food production

Course highlights community-focused food production

Assiniboine Community College is encouraging students to think outside the box through the Local Food Sustainability program, which will take place on the school’s North Hill campus from May to October.

According to a recent news release from ACC, this new program is designed to give students the knowledge and tools they need to create change within their own respective communities, which may not be naturally conditioned to grow food in the first place.

“We’re looking at things like how to build consensus locally to start a community garden program,” Ryan Whibbs of ACC’s Manitoba Institute of Culinary Arts said in a March 18 news release.

“How you build funds to get a local food production and (a) security program going, how to engage with social media to promote and inspire these programs?”

A significant part of this new program will also adopt an Indigenous approach to food production, with First Peoples Development Inc. providing the funding to give students the opportunity to engage with local knowledge keepers.

“FPDI recognizes the need to create solutions for and work toward food security,” FPDI executive director Joan Harris-Warren said in the same news release.

“The intent is to train First Nation individuals how to grow, produce and sustain the production of local food on reserve.”

Whibbs later told the Sun over the phone that teaching students to be adaptable when building sustainable food systems is especially important right now.

Not only is the Westman area at a natural disadvantage due to a shorter-than-average growing season, but that system is also being increasingly interrupted by wildcard variables like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, Whibbs pointed out that large-scale producers were hampered by intense demand for particular kinds of food from different communities in the immediate wake of the outbreak, which resulted in lots of stops and starts in terms of getting that food to market.

“And I think the only way to have a more robust food system that can respond to those shifts more easily is to have more people on the ground working and thinking locally about what they are producing,” he said on Thursday. “Because sometimes the larger the producer, the less localized their perspective is.”

Luckily, Whibbs said groups like the Brandon Food Council have already proven that a community-focused approach to food systems can work, which will give ACC students a pre-existing model to work off of if they decide to sign up for the Local Food Sustainability program.

“This is one of the best ways for them to directly take part in the food system and actually create real change locally,” he said.

Anyone interested in applying for this full-time program can contact FPDI representative Barb Moran at Bmoran@fpdinc.ca or 204-791-4429.

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Published at Tue, 06 Apr 2021 08:00:00 +0000