Round two of the Parkdale Community Food Market is underway and we are ecstatic! Though the nuts and bolts are still being finalized we couldn’t help but share some of the great support and attention this project is receiving. Parkdale Food Network member and Parkdale villager reporter Erin Hatfield wrote a great piece – link below- on the work the PFN is doing in supporting our Market. It is a true community initiative and a labor of love. Happy Reading!
Report back from June 26 PFN meeting
The Parkdale Food Network held its third meeting on June 26 2013 at the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre and brought together over 30 participants from a wide range of collaborators from local social service agencies, city staff, housing providers, and community members. The PFN meeting was convened as an opportunity for collective reflection on the PFN’s efforts for the past year – the PFN was officially launched in spring 2012.
The meeting began with the opening remarks from Victor Willis, Executive Director of PARC, who provided an overview of various activities that the PFN has undertaken – the genesis of Parkdale Community Food Market, the development of the Community Land Trust initiative, the community engagement work in partnership with Maytree Foundation’s Building Blocks, and the bulk-buying initiative.
As one key activity from 2013 for two years, Victor introduced the Community Food Flow project funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation. The introduction was followed by the local MPP Cheri DiNovo who also joined the PFN meeting to give a speech to congratulate on this innovative exploration of food distribution and procurement work in the community food sector.
The introduction was followed by another food security project spearheaded by the West End Food Co-op: Co-op cred program. Co-op Cred program is a food security accessibility tool built on an alternative currency model. It is a debit-based membership card program that everyone can access, but that can be used in particular to facilitate access for low-income and marginalized groups to the health and economic benefits of local and nutritious food at the Co-op. The pilot project has been developed in partnership with PARC Ambassador Program.
For more details, a great article that captured the presentation and stories from Bob Rose, PARC senior manager and PARC Ambassadors is available at the Inside Toronto/Parkdale Villager.
The second focus of the meeting was the Community Food Flow. The Community Food Flow project is a community food assessment that explores assets and challenges of food distribution and procurement in the community food sector, while also combining research with partnership development and capacity building. Building on lessons from the PFN’s Bulk-Buying initiative, the CFF project hopes to expand its scope of partnership and potential collaborative solutions to food distribution and procurement.
The presentation was to provide a project summary to PFN members and CFF partners as well as to present initial findings from the first phase of research. And the next steps are the survey to paint a detailed landscape of commonalities and differences among organizations, and the focus groups to assess opportunities and potential strategies for overcoming existing challenges. The PowerPoint presentation is available here (the interim report is forthcoming).
Thirdly,the Parkdale Community Food Market team – Ayal from West End Food Co-op, Rachel from Greenest City, and Niveen from Toronto Youth Food Policy Council – gave a brief presentation on the project development. The Parkdale Community Food Market intends to bring affordable healthy food to the South Parkdale, where a large number of community members face daily challenges of food insecurity and access to fresh and healthy food at affordable prices. The Market is also envisioned as a community-run space that recognizes differences, and acts as a point of gathering for the diverse community members of Parkdale. The team is currently planning a pilot project with a view of launching it on July 31 Wednesday at Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre. More detailed information will be updated on this website soon!
Thanks goes to the West End Food Co-op for providing refreshments;
And special thanks to all the funders for making all the innovative works possible;
Parkdale Food Network Meeting June 26th
Parkdale Food Network holds its third Community Meeting as follows.
Date: June 26th (Wed)
Time: 2-5 p.m
Location: Masaryk-Cowan Community Center
(220 Cowan Ave: Click here for MAP)
RSVP: http://www.eventbrite.ca/event/7043267603
The Queen Street West Restaurant Study
The City Planning Division has been conducting a Queen Street West Restaurant Study for the Parkdale area between Dufferin St. and Roncesvalles Ave. The study aims to assess whether any additional zoning controls could be used to mitigate some negative impacts of the concentration of restaurants and bars in the area.
The public consultation meeting is scheduled on April 29 (Monday) 2013 from 7:00pm-9:00pm at May Robinson Auditorium, 20 West Lodge just east of Lansdowne Avenue.
PARC Co-op Cred program updates
It has been two months since the PARC Co-op cred program began in partnership with the West End Food Coop (see the orientation session facilitated by the WEFC). Currently, PARC Ambassadors are taking part in the program at two sites: WEFC co-op store and Greenest City’s community garden.
At the WEFC site, 5 PARC Ambassadors work as kitchen staff, produce staff and inventory staff. For them it is crucial to get a Food Handler Certification to prepare, cook and serve safe food. as a part of the employment training, they are going through a certificate program at the WEFC.
At the Greenest City site, three Ambassadors work in a community garden and learn how to grow food. They learn how to manage a community garden from from weeding and watering to making a compost and harvesting. The Ambassadors hope to become a leader of sharing their learned skills with other community members and promoting more urban agriculture activities in Parkdale. Urban agriculture is an essential part of building a sustainable local food system by increasing local food production capacity.
The dawn of community engagement in local land use debate
The NLT made its debut! We had the table for the Parkdale BIA event, ‘Spring Into Parkdale’ and facilitated the participatory exercise.
People were asked 1) to pin a dot for where and how long they live in Parkdale and 2) to place a post-it for where and what they would like to see more in Parkdale. Different colours of post-its represent different things that people want to see: affordable housing (pink); green space (green); community space (yellow); and retail opportunities (blue).
As it was the Parkdale Village BIA event organized along the Queen Street West, those who participated the exercise tend to live around Queen St West. And they hope to see desirable changes in the south area of Parkdale, predominantly for more affordable housing but also coupled with needs for green space and community space.
Building on this first step, NLT hopes to continue and expand community engagement efforts!
NLT will be at Parkdale BIA’s ‘Spring into Parkdale’ event
Neighbourhood Land Trust – a community land trust in Parkdale – is going to have a table at Parkdale BIA’s ‘Spring into Parkdale‘ event. If you are interested in ‘community ownership of land’, democratic local management, or alternative land development, please come out to find out more at the NLT table! We also have an exciting participatory exercise ready so that we can start to be part of planning NLT.
You can find NLT’s table in front of PARC (1499 Queen Street West).
Planting the seeds of CLT in Toronto
On February 15th 2013, Parkdale’s community land trust, Neighbourhood Land Trust, was invited to a Community Land Trust Workshop at the University of Toronto, organized by Susannah Bunce from UofT and a collaborative researcher, Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz from Boston University. The workshop featured John Emmeus Davis, a CLT consultant from Burlington Associates, while convening practitioners, researchers, and students from various organizations in Toronto who are interested in the possibility of CLT.
The first half of the workshop was led by John, who gave the CLT 101 presentation that helped the participants build a common understanding of CLT. First John took us back to the historical roots of the CLT movement such as the Garden City movement, the Civil Rights movement, and Gandhi’s political philosophy of ‘from political movement to constructive movement.’ What is common here is that CLT movement started as struggles over the redistribution of benefits produced from lands to those people who would otherwise be excluded. This opening was a great context-setting for the workshop, because the historical root is sometimes paid little attention by policy-makers and practitioners in the face of urgency to prove the CLT model as an efficient tool for delivering affordable housing.
Throughout the workshop, John emphasized that it is a means, not an end, for CLTs to own lands and provide affordable housing; land stewardship is the core tool of CLTs to achieve organizational mission. It is thus that CLTs may need to focus on land stewardship and pursue other functions by building partnerships with other organizations who possess those expertise and experience that CLTs don’t – non-profit housing development and provision, commercial development, and urban agriculture for example. Interestingly enough, John pointed out that many CLTs fail because of real estate risks, not because of CLT related challenges such as a democratic governance model, complicated membership development and so on.
If land stewardship is at the core, then what differentiates CLTs from conservation Land Trusts that is more familiar in Canada? A key distinction – and why it is called ‘community’ land trust – is that a CLT is about building a community through land ownership by allowing large community members to be part of decision-making, to be represented at the board of directors through its classic 1/3 governance model, which is often absent in conservation land trust whose purpose is preservation of land. Of course just insuring the 1/3 governance model does not guarantee the thorough representation of all community members, but the point of the 1/3 governance model, according to John, is not to give any majority vote to any group.
Further, John went on to point out that there are ‘differences’ in any neighbourhood that we cannot erase; nor we can pretend that they do not exist. It is the 1/3 governance model that enables us to ‘institutionalize such differences and conflicting interests’ to talk about them in an open democratic space. In this regard, some may think that opening up membership may make it difficult to operate CLTs as it brings in diverse members whose visions may differe, but that is the moment when community organizing becomes crucial. The 1/3 model is just a prototype such that it can be modified according to local conditions. Like we discussed in the previous post, Parkdale’s CLT may need to refashion the prototype to accommodate its neighbourhood diversity.
The second half of the day was dedicated to discussing the challenges and opportunities for implementing CLT in Toronto. An opportunity is that many different groups of people got together at this workshop and started to talk about the potential of CLT in Toronto. This is a momentum that we should keep building on. On the other hand, the key challenges identified are: how to secure land and financial resources for acquisition give the hot real estate market of Toronto; how to get buy-in from the city council and the city hall – the political support is essential to stabilize the CLTs; and how to leverage ongoing initiatives to start CLTs – Parkdale one and TCH one – to expand the possibility of proliferating CLTs in different neighbourhoods.
PARC and PPE at YIMBY Festival 2013!
PARC and its collaborative project, Parkdale People’s Economy were at the 6th annual YIMBY! Festival!
It was a great opportunity to showcase PARC’s ongoing activities as “A community where people rebuild their lives” through providing supportive housing programs, one of the largest drop-in meal programs in Toronto, outreach programs, Ambassadors project, and many others.
PARC’s Prezi presentation
And, PPE presented its community economic development projects incubated through the combination of ongoing community initiatives in Parkdale.
Parkdale People’s Economy Prezi presentation
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Thanks to Geoff Gans, Communications Lead at PARC and Claudia Reinoza for creating the wonderful Prezis!
Co-op Cred program in action!
Co-op cred program is a community food security accessibility tool based on an alternative currency model that facilitates low-income people’s participation in the healthy and economic benefits of local, organic, and sustainable food. Community members engage in volunteer activities at community organizations like West End Food Co-op and Greenest City and receive co-op creds in return while also enabling them to develop employment skills and accumulate additional wealth regardless of social assistance restriction. Currently, we are developing and implementing a pilot project with PARC Ambassadors program to see how this idea unfolds in practice and to gauge the possibility of expanding the program to include more community members at large.
On February 13 2013, we had the first orientation session at West End Food Coop. Sasha and Ayal from WEFC gave an orientation to 5 PARC Ambassadors who will work at the WEFC site as kitchen assistants, floor assistant, and produce assistant. The orientation covered not only what activities the PARC ambassadors will perform but also the philosophy behind the WEFC, its programming, and its relation to the Co-op cred program.
A detailed story about the WEFC can be found in ‘About Us‘ from their website, but what sparked PARC ambassadors’ interests most was WEFC’s attempt to bridge the urban and rural as a multistakeholder co-operative whose members include eaters (consumers) producers, workers, and community partners.
The WEFC attempts to address issues of urban hunger and rural poverty together that are often debated separately. For example income is an issue for most people’s access to healthy local food in urban settings, but at the same time farmers and producers are also facing declining income challenges because of policy changes that negatively affect their farming, an unsustainable food system, and development pressures that threaten farming lands in Ontario. So, WEFC is working with farmers and local producers to pay ‘fair’ prices for their produces. But ‘fair’ prices may not be always accessible to everyone. Here the co-op cred proram comes in as pat of strategies making local healthy food accessible to everyone.
Reflecting on their public engagement work on Edmond Place, Ambassadors were very excited about the idea behind the co-op and got very keen on supporting and spreading their activities. They hope to learn more about the co-op by directly engaging in their work, while developing public speaking and engagement skills through the Ambassadors program.
