For five years, The Local Community Food Centre in Stratford, ON grew food in raised garden boxes in their backyard. With city regulations preventing them from planting a garden on the centre’s spacious property, the boxes served as a workaround solution, where program participants built basic gardening skills and complemented community meals with home-grown ingredients. But they always dreamt of doing more. After securing several government and community grants, and a few acres of green space in the form of a city-owned former soccer field, they were ready to dig shovels into the soil on their first community garden.
Everything but the fence was built and planted by 30 hard-working community members, many of whom come to The Local regularly for meals and programming. And 40 community members have been given their own personal plot to grow whatever they like. This group of newly minted gardeners come together three times a week to tend to their plots, swap tips, show off the day’s harvest, and tackle those tasks that require more than two hands. A 1,500-square-foot area of the garden is being used to grow food solely for The Local’s community meal programs. Food can’t get more local than that.
A community centre built around good food
The community garden is just one kind of program offered at The Local CFC. Their food access programs, including the popular Monday Night Dinner, Seniors Lunch, and Community Access Market — which they’ve recently taken on the road to two neighbouring communities with their vibrant Mobile Market — help community members living on low incomes access healthy food. Their many food skills programs, such as Seed, Feed, and Lead, and Family Harvest Kitchen, help participants build skills in both cooking and gardening, and have helped 79% of them make healthy changes to their diets. At FoodFit, facilitator Kate supports both adults and youth to make positive changes to their health through cooking, exercising, and learning about nutrition along the way. And The Local’s EPIC Social Justice Club always has an issues-based campaign on the go. Whether they’re advocating for affordable housing or empowering people to reclaim underused space to grow food, 55% of participants have become more engaged on community issues since coming to The Local.
Piloting a new approach
The Local CFC serves low-income communities in Stratford and three surrounding counties, where 11% of the population is food insecure. Stratford also has a high population of seniors, with 20% of community members age 65 and older. Community Food Centres Canada partnered with the United Way of Perth-Huron to launch The Local Community Food Centre in 2012. It was one of two pilot sites developed to test the CFC model in new communities, and determine if the approach could be scaled nationally. The United Way of Perth-Huron‘s leadership in developing one of the earliest Community Food Centres built on their work to engage people living in poverty and mobilize the community to take action.
We are currently part of a growing network of 11 Community Food Centres across the country and work together with an additional 170+ Good Food Organizations across North America to influence provincial and national policy makers to develop more equitable and just social policies.
COOK
Kitchen skills programming and community kitchens to help our community members improve confidence and increase enjoyment in the preparation of nutritious and delicious food
GROW
Garden skills programming provides our community with more control over our collective food environment
SHARE
Community meals and low-cost produce markets reduce the barriers many of our community members experience to accessing good, healthy food for themselves and their families
ADVOCATE
For access to good, healthy food for everyone in our community
"Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participant's sense of self."
-Charles Duhigg
CHANGE A LIFE TODAY
An important portion of The Local is funded by members of our community just like you! Even a small monthly contribution in dollars or hours can make a big difference in the lives of our fellow neighbours living with food insecurity.
