In this episode I am speaking with Churchill Fellow, Community Food Forester, Community Gardens Australia QLD Coordinator, multi-award-winning Landscape Architect and Permaculture Educator, Gavin Hardy – based not far from me in Meanjin, Brisbane.
Gav and I go way back to the early days of setting up Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, where he’s now the education coordinator.
In 2020, Gav was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate the potential of community food forests and orchards. Because of the pandemic his journey was delayed, but finally he got to visit 10 of the world’s exemplar sites and recorded 51 projects in the USA, Canada, UK, The Netherlands and Italy. We sat down shortly after his report was released for this chat.
In this conversation, we talk about what he learned, the insights and recommendations for establishing successful community food forest and orchard projects here in Australia (but obviously ideas that are relevant around the world) as well as his path into permaculture and how his livelihood is connected.
Gavin’s Churchill Fellowship Report
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Read the full transcipt:
Morag:
In this episode, I’m speaking with Churchill Fellow, community food forester, multi award winning landscape architect and permaculture educator, Gavin Hardy. He’s not far from me in Meanjin, Brisbane. Gav and I go way back to the early days of setting up Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, where he’s now the education coordinator. In 2020, Gav was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate the potential of community food, forests and origins. Because of the pandemic, his journey was delayed, but finally he got to visit 10 of the world’s exemplar sites, and actually went on to record 51 projects in the United States, Canada, UK, the Netherlands and Italy. So we sat down together shortly after his report about this was released for this chat.
In the conversation, we talked about what he learned, the insights and the recommendations for establishing successful community food, forest and orchard projects here in Australia. But obviously, the ideas are relevant around the world.
Welcome everyone to the Sense Making in a Changing World show. We have a special guest here today. He’s someone who I’ve known for decades, probably one of the first people I met when I first moved from the southern part of Australia to Brisbane, and got involved in the Northey Street City Farm project right at the very beginning. This is Gavin Hardy! Welcome Gav to the show.
Gavin:
Thanks, Morag. Thank you very much.
Morag:
So Gavin has just returned from an epic journey to five countries – the United States, Canada, UK, the Netherlands and Italy on a Churchill Fellowship. A little bit of a postponed one because of COVID not allowing you to go when you actually wanted this Fellowship. So you went to look at the potential of community food forests and orchards. In reading your report, you were saying you went to 51 sites, but you had 10 official sites. So you just immersed yourself over a period of what a couple of months in the world of community food forests. Some listeners calling in from around the world probably don’t know what a Churchill Fellowship is. So maybe, let’s begin there. And then we can go into the community food forest topic.
Gavin:
Yeah, that’s a good place to start. So the Churchill Fellowships have been around since the 1960s. They’re available in Australia, the UK, and as I also understand, Canada. People might have heard of Winston Churchill, a famous person who earned a lot of respect in Australia, particularly from returning soldiers from World War Two. When he passed away, a memorial was set up for Winston Churchill in the form of this educational scholarship trust.
The story goes that it’s the biggest fundraising effort ever in Australia, where I believe 2 million pounds were raised on one Sunday back in the 1960s. It wasn’t done using a smartphone or credit card, people were actually going door to door and getting cash. It’s the only time that the banks have ever had to open on a Sunday to receive all that money. It was a big fundraising success because Churchill had a lot of respect in the Australian community.
From there, that Fellowship has been around and Churchill Fellowships are available to anyone from any walk of life. If you’re passionate about something that you feel you can only go overseas to learn this stuff, then you’re the person to do it – you have a chance. I’d been thinking about doing a Churchill Fellowship for 10 years, I’d been nagging my partner Amanda about it, throwing her crazy ideas about what I was going to do with my Churchill Fellowship, then finally landed a really, really cracker of an idea. In 2020, I was successful in the application. So very, very happy about that.
Morag:
Yeah, so the Fellowship funds you to travel around to an end journey and an investigation of your choice of topic, meeting the people that you know in the world who have the information you want and bring back to Australia to share with the community. That’s how I understand it, and they’re open every year to apply for, aren’t they? You don’t have to have a degree, just a passion, an experience and an opportunity to share – to want to share it back out to the community.
Gavin:
Exactly. You don’t need to be an academic to get a Churchill Fellowship. In fact, a few years ago, I met a bloke who was an acrobat. He was going overseas to learn new tricks and new techniques. So you can come from anywhere to do a Churchill Fellowship. Some of the other things that have come out of Churchill Fellowship are things like the Neighbourhood Watch Scheme. So some of this stuff has a really big influence in Australia.
Morag:
Thinking back to what we were talking about just before we turned on the recording, that is the value of the Churchill Fellowship, sending you out to do this research on really important things and then bring it back to document. So you’ve documented this, you’ve got your report now available on the website, so check that out if you’re listening! Let’s go into that. Why are you so passionate about this topic of community food forests? What about community food forests and community gardens really ignites your passion?
Gavin:
Yeah, okay. So I’ve been involved in community gardening, as you alluded to We were involved way back in the 90s of Northey Street, getting that up and running in Brisbane. Since then, I’ve been involved in community food projects for a long time and in multiple places. I guess I’ve always been inspired and excited by growing food in public places. It’s a social connection, I always meet great people and it’s about reclaiming the commons – turning places that’re underutilised into really thriving public spaces.
They’re unique places, they’re different from a park. They’re places where people can come together, learn how to grow food, and enjoy each other’s company, while also restoring the environment. It’s great for biodiversity and animals and urban nature – community gardens in general. So when you think about community gardens, you might think about the old style allotment gardens where people rent a plot to grow vegetables, maybe some fruit, but also shared gardening spaces. They’re probably the spaces I’m more excited about, where people collectively garden together. From there, my thinking has sort of evolved into food forests and orchards.
We’ve got a few examples of them in Australia, but we don’t have a lot so I wanted to travel overseas and understand how they work to compare them to the way we do community gardening here. I get really fired up about food forests because they seem to me to be very resilient, sustainable systems that’ve been around for a long time. Martin Crawford talks about forests in the subtropics and the tropics that’ve been around for 15,000 years. They’re a very old system and provide copious amounts of food. So I’m really interested in that. And then orcharding as well. Orchards are probably a bit more of a basic form of food forestry. But the orchards are things that people understand a bit more readily than food forests.
Morag:
So what’s your definition of a community food forest?
Gavin:
Good question. So, food forests. Typically, all food forests mimic the patterns that you might find in a natural forest. If people think about the forests that I visited, perhaps at a national park or local bush land, forests have layers – so think about the tallest trees in the canopy layer, there might be a lower tree below that and then shrubbery. Then the herbaceous layer at various levels and at the ground level up to your chest height. Think groundcovers and vines. So we see that pattern repeatedly through nature. Food forests mimic that pattern, mainly with edible plants for humans and support species. The reason why that’s happened is because forests are one of the most abundant ecosystems on the planet. Perhaps the coral reefs and the underwater seaweed forests are more productive in terms of biomass. But forests certainly up there in terms of their biomass.
So if we can mimic those structures and relationships in food forests, then we get a huge amount of food out of them. So that’s a food forest. They’re quite complex, in some ways, and to understand them, starting with an orchard is a much simpler thing. An orchard is typically orderly rows of fruit and or nut trees, traditionally on pasture grazed by sheep, cattle or ranging poultry through them. These days in an urban setting, the animals have generally been replaced by the lawnmower. So there must be a much simpler system. I don’t think most people understand what an orchard is. They’re part of the cultural landscape.
Morag:
I see lots of food forests in people’s backyards. In rural homesteads, there’s usually sections of food forest and I see a number of food forests in parts of community gardens, because of my experience of being involved in Northey Street City Farm and other similar projects. I wonder what you’ve noticed as being the different challenges that you’ve come across to establish community food forests, as opposed to community orchards because doing it in your own backyard, it’s okay, you get to choose and you can decide how you want to design it. But what challenges have you found for the establishment of commons based food forests?
Gavin:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So there’s a few different challenges. Some of these challenges are common to all community food projects – allotment shared gardens, an orchard, or a food forest. And some of them are specific to a food forest. I can go through some of them. One major one is fundraising, bringing a group of people together to do work in public space requires funds. How do people do that? So that’s one particular challenge. In my overseas work, I found out a whole whole range of different strategies that people are using to fund themselves. Some of these operations are big, they’re half a million dollar charities that are rolling out lots of food funds to all over their regions. So funding is definitely a challenge for folks, motivating volunteers – a really, really common issue across community food projects all across the country.
If there’s anyone watching all this has been involved in a community garden, you’ll know that the volunteer effort is keeping up the motivation is another really big challenge. My work overseas demonstrated that there’s a whole lot of different strategies. Perhaps we’ll talk about the strategies a bit more, but keeping people involved and interested, how do you do that?
So that’s another key to challenge, getting groups united. How do we work together as humans? We often work together well, but sometimes we don’t. Have you noticed? So groups have evolved different, different strategies around resolving conflict, or in a more positive sense, working with that diversity of opinion. What are the tools in the toolkit for bringing in people’s different ideas? How do we sift them and filter them and bring them together to create better ideas from all those individual ideas? So as groups overseas, particularly I’m thinking of Beacon Food Forest in Seattle – some great processes around how they do that.
They’re probably my top three challenges in that community food forest space. Particularly focusing on food forests, we might think about education. As I was saying, food forests are quite complex, aren’t they? And how do you convey that complexity in a public setting? People are coming into a space and going, ‘Oh, what’s this? What’s this all about?’ It might look like a collection of trees that most folks won’t even recognize as a food forest. So how do you get the message across? We can talk about signage by examples of how to communicate the message.
Morag:
Yeah. That’s a lot of really great points to drop in there. I wonder whether another one would be about communicating with the land owners, land managers, land stewards? What’s that relationship? How do you communicate with the local council or whoever it might be? Has that been something that came up as being a really big thing? I know you’ve been on both sides of that conversation, I’ve worked with in council as well. What challenges are there and how do we overcome some of those challenges in communicating this idea of a different wave of public landscape?
Gavin:
Yeah, we talk about councils, but more generally, we talk about the landowner. In Australia, that’s generally the local council, because people want to do work in a public open space or parkland, but it can also be the local church, it can be the Scout den, it can be the local library. There’s lots of different places where this stuff is being integrated, even the local cemetery. I came across a big orchard in a cemetery in Philadelphia. Conversations with different landowners, that’s important. It’s taking people on this journey, talking about the benefits, talking up the benefits of community food forests, particularly in an urban setting. There are examples of food forests in rural and regional settings as well.
But it’s talking about the tremendous benefits and in my work overseas, I sort of categorised four different benefits. One of them being biodiversity, so the fauna and flora in a place. So some of those projects are immense in what they’re doing in biodiversity. So a beacon food forest, for example, has 1000 different species of plants. Wow, that’s crazy. Not 1000 plants. 1000 species!
Morag:
How big is Beacon? What’s the scale?
Gavin:
It’s relatively small. Let me see if I get this right, it’s just over three acres in size.
Morag:
That’s amazing.
Gavin:
Yeah, it’s just wedge with this incredible biodiversity. The Agroforestry Research Trust, Martin Crawford’s site in the UK, his Dartington site has about 300 species of plants. In the Picasso food forests in Italy, another 300 species. Now why is the diversity of plants important? Because it helps us support a diversity of animals, of the fauna. And so the Picasso food forest recorded about 300 species of fauna. On their tiny little site, their site is half and half a hectare. And they’ve recorded 50 species of birds on their site, and we’re not talking about fungus or mycelium either.
Morag:
Just the visible things that you can see and measure easily, yeah.
Gavin:
Yeah, so the fungal networks as well, the different types of fungi, they’re recording in those places, it’s quite immense. Some of these places started off like Beacon, Picasso started off as just grass fields, they were pretty low on diversity.
Morag:
Biodiversity like that, visibly showing the beauty and the benefit of having more biodiverse spaces. What you notice when you pass by a place like that, the feeling of coolness, maybe on a hot day, or the sound of the birds and the insects or the smell of a flowering citrus. There’s so many other intangible qualities that are really hard to measure, but it’s that quality of life that comes when you are in proximity to those spaces.
Gavin:
Exactly. And that’s a beautiful segue into one of the other benefits, which is health and well being. In my work, I was going into places and recording my thoughts and feelings. In these places, when people have a look at the report, you’ll see some little breakout boxes about how I was feeling in some of these places. Generally the feeling is one of total security and just really lovely places to be in, like the amenity value of these places is immense.
Parking up under a shady apple tree or a walnut tree as I did in Canada and the USA, just feeling like I could be there all day. No reason to go, just totally relaxing, unthreatening, not a threatening environment at all, just very welcoming spaces. So I recorded that. And I think it’s important for us as a movement to be talking about those sorts of health and wellness, that amenity benefit.
Another amenity benefit I was getting was just the social connection. So I attended some harvesting events put on by some of these amazing organisations that advertise different events that are happening in the orchard. It might be a pruning event, or a mulching thing that’s going on. But I was there during the harvest season. So I was attending apple picking sessions in Seattle, in Victoria, in British Columbia, on Vancouver Island and in London. Those events are fantastic, just for connecting with people – just having a laugh, sharing stories, sharing the yields, having a bite on the fruit and picking big quantities of apples. Feeling really great because those apples are taken to charity given to people or actually processed into bespoke ciders or ales.
Morag:
What were some of the other people saying that you met up with? Why do they go to those places, why do they come along and volunteer? You must have asked a lot of people I imagine.
Gavin:
Yeah, so you know, folks are coming along for different reasons. Some people are doing a permaculture course and learning about how these places operate and getting some information about how they could design an orchard or a food forest. Other people are just attending because they love it. They’ve done a few in the past and that’s their social connection.
When I was in London I actually met someone at the harvest event. There was this lovely woman who flew in from Israel to attend this event! There were a couple of other community food related events for a week that she had in London. The jet set coming in to attend this event because she just felt she didn’t have that opportunity in Israel. And obviously, she had a bit of money behind it to do it! But she wanted to come and get the benefit of that social connection.
The commonality is social connection. People coming in to get a bit of the yield, take a bit of that home. It’s either as a table fruit or to turn it into apple sauce and then make a lot of that to give to their friends and neighbours. So there’s all sort of stuff going on in the informal economy as well.
Morag:
Yeah, so there are two benefits: health and wellbeing. What’s the first one that you mentioned about biodiversity? What are the other key benefits that you pegged?
Gavin:
I might just have to pull up my report. There’s so much in this report, or even I forget what’s in there. Let me just go through a little bit. One of the other benefits is obvious, about food sustainability. I guess this is in a few categories. So food justice and food sovereignty. But maybe all of your listeners and viewers know what those concepts are about.
Morag:
I’m sure some people would, but it’d be worth just distinguishing the difference between those two things.
Gavin:
So food justice and food sovereignty. I talk about those definitions as part of the report. In a nutshell, food justice is about allowing anyone to have access to food. Now, in our country, we might not see that as a problem. But in some parts of the world, that is a massive problem. In rural, regional and remote parts of Australia, that’s a thing too. So allowing people to have universal access to food, particularly fresh food. Okay. Food sovereignty is about allowing different cultural groups to be able to make decisions about the way that they grow, cultivate and process food in their own way. They’re two very important differences, very important concepts in the whole food sustainability movement. It’s not just about yields, it’s about the cultural interaction between food and culture.
Morag:
I was going to ask you, how much did you see those key parts being part of the reason that people were doing this work?
Gavin:
Yes. So in my report, I talked about how there are hundreds and possibly thousands of community groups that are in the northern hemisphere who are motivated by those concepts. What they’re doing, they’re installing the food forest in the orchards on properties that they manage – they might even own it, most probably lease it. They’re restoring old orchards on abandoned public land. Then there’s groups that are going out who are harvesting the urban orchard, like the event that I attended. So there’s a group in Seattle, for example, called City Fruit, and they harvest the urban orchards. So Seattle reportedly has 7000 fruit trees in public places. Which is quite remarkable when you think about it.
They’re going around and harvesting those fruit trees and then distributing that food to charity so that people get access to fresh table fruit. The fruit that’s a bit spoiled, a bit buggy or a little bit bruised, will be processed into ciders and beverages. And that’s fruit that would normally just go to waste. It would just rot on the ground.
Morag:
I think this is really interesting because a lot of comments that I’ve heard about why local authorities might not want to have urban fruit trees is because of the problem of the fallen fruit and the public health issues that entails. Whereas when you combine having an organisation and supporting an organisation to be able to engage in this work, I wonder how that group supported itself? Because if they’re harvesting it to then give it back to charity just harvesting from public fruit, what’s the relationship between the public fruit and this group?
Gavin:
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s a big question. So, I guess there’s a couple of things with local authorities generally trying to get rid of the fruit trees, because they dump all this rotting fruit on the ground. So these organisations are set up to ameliorate that problem, really helping out the local authority, eliminating that issue. The groups are funded in really interesting and diverse ways to be able to offer that service. So they’re going around and harvesting the fruit trees for no charge. And I was like, wow, how do they do that? They’re employing five or six or more people. How are they offering a livelihood, but getting a service for next to no charge or free? The way they’re doing that is partnering.
So there’s this partnership model that I talk about in the report. So an organisation like city fruit, they’ll partner with charitable food banks and other organisations like meal programs, organisations that are helping out people in need. The funders, they’ll say that City Fruit is helping out the charitable food sector. And now they want to fund City Fruit because they’re an enabler for the food bank and they’re offering fresh food. A lot of food banks are offering people processed food, but now they’re offering fresh food. So funders will come in and fund that as well as the donors, the sponsors and everyone else.
The other thing that these groups do really well is their fundraising themes, their demons when it comes to the fundraising stuff. They have social media people, they’ve got fundraising experts, a board of directors or management committee, they’re all out there every day promoting what they do. They’re amazing networkers. City Fruit in Seattle has hundreds of different funding sources coming in – philanthropic foundations, government grants, donors and sponsors, individual donors and they’re running small businesses on the side, which also promotes the organisation and provides an income. They’ll be running tree care services, they might run a gourmet food tour, they’ll be making ciders and ale and they’ll be selling that in partnership with a beverage provider and getting 10% of the profits.
Morag:
What I’m hearing you talk about is really a local food ecology, this ecology of organisations that exist together and there’s no kind of coordinating body, but they’re all interconnected. There’s obviously a conversation that happens amongst them and it seems like there’s a culture of local food in that city. But I wonder whether there are events or advocacy organisations that bring together those different sectors. I would imagine the same in Brisbane, if we had organised spaces where all those different groups could come in and be in conversation together, more of that partnership and collaboration would happen – not to control each other, but just so more of those connections can be made. Is it about creating more context for connection to happen to support these? Do you think that’s like a key part of this?
Gavin:
Yeah, exactly. There’s some amazing organisations overseas and we’ve got some good ones here too. So when you were talking then I thought about Sustain in Melbourne, they’re running an agriculture month in November and you were involved last November and so was I. Sustain is about bringing different groups together and talking about urban agriculture with community food as part of that story and bringing different organisations together to have one voice, to be in alliance. The shareable food banks are in that conversation as well, different organisations, universities which are really important players in this. Some of the organisations overseas that I met with, they’re partnering with universities, post grads and undergrads are coming in and doing research on site, producing lots of data publications and that’s attracting funding, as well from government organisations because they can see some rigour and defendability there. So amazing stuff.
I talked about Sustain just then in Australia. Overseas, one of the big things that’s in the Pacific Northwest, in that area of Seattle and British Columbia, going down into Oregon, is the food policy councils, they’re big things. So they’re groups that come together to talk about food policy at a higher level, they bring in lots of different groups and network. Really getting the conversation going with the power brokers in government and in corporations. You’re right, we need to bring in different groups and talk about what our commonalities are. My role at Community Gardens Australia, I’m at the operational level, but I know at the board level, they’re really deeply committed to that conversation with like minded groups.
Morag:
Did you recently have a meeting in Canberra? Were you at that meeting? Was that a policy meeting? What happened at that one?
Gavin:
Yeah, so I was involved in the Canberra Urban Agriculture Forum. That was a great meeting, probably 50 people in the room. One of the senators was there, Senator David Pocock, he spoke for a bit – very supportive of what we do in urban agriculture in general and community food. Then there were four Churchill Fellows talking, so Dr. Nick Rose, Abbey Lacey, who is the president of Community Gardens Australia, and Fiona Buting who’s the Canberra president. They’re all really interested in urban incubator programs for young farmers, and of course, you know all these people Morag.
So that was a great forum, there was a lot of discussion about what’s the future for Canberra in terms of local food? You know, Canberra only gets 5% of its food locally. It’s very dependent on imported food. Not sure what the definition of local is, whether it’s within the ACT boundary or not. But, yes, there’s so much potential in Canberra for a local food movement. They’ve got lots of open space. They’ve got a great cohort of people who know how to grow food. There’s already a small little orchard industry. It’s been around for decades in Canada.
Morag:
And an amazing food co-op movement as well. There’s a brilliant food co-op, right in the heart of the city. So we’ve done three benefits. Let’s get to the fourth one. What did you see is the core fourth benefit of food forests?
Gavin:
So just going back a little bit to food. I talked about food sustainability, but I didn’t talk about yields. Some of these organisations are getting amazing yields. So in 2021, the Lifecycles Project in Canada, they harvested 79 tons of apples from the urban orchard. It’s a city of 350,000 people, that’s the size of Victoria, from public and private apple trees. So getting significant amounts of food. In a typical year, 2021 was a big year through North America for yields. But typically they get 15 to 20 tons every year of fruit. So really good stuff. Some of those harvest events like the London harvest event in one morning got half a ton of apples from five trees.
Morag:
So how much of the community food forests are actually measuring their yield? Because when you go out to industrial agriculture you measure how much wheat you get. Whereas when you come into a food forest, you can measure the apples because the apples are a thing. But to look at that whole system of 300 species which mostly you’re not harvesting at all, because it’s part of the system itself. It’s a completely different model. How do you then use that? What are the kinds of indicators and monitoring systems that are being used to talk about yield in a way that can compare? Because it’s not apples with apples, you know, it’s a completely different beast!
Gavin:
Yeah. It’s a particular challenge. The orchards, the community orchard organisations, they are measuring with portable scales and that’s a relatively easy thing to do. But because of this tremendous diversity you get in some of these food forests, unless you’re walking around with your portable scales, weighing every single plant that you’re harvesting from, it’s a very tricky thing to do. And I think we’re not there yet with getting the metrics, there was a food forest that recently harvested 1700 kilos. So they’ve got a little bit of metric there, but they’re also 24/7 open as well, they encourage people to come in and harvest.
Morag:
Who knows? I mean, from City Farm and other community gardens and universities, you encourage people just to harvest a leaf here and there. You have no idea how many leaves have come off, it’s not like you’re going to rip out the whole lettuce and weigh that to say, ‘Okay, we’ve got 100 kilos of lettuce today.’ It’s this constant flow and when you measure just yield you miss out on all the other benefits that you’re talking about. It’s really about taking those metrics to a different logical typing, stepping out from just quantification of kilos of food.
Gavin:
Exactly. What some of these organisations do really well is in their annual reports, they might talk about yield, but they’ll be able to put into metrics those non tangible benefits. So how many people got involved in events over the whole year? How many volunteers did they have? So they get those sorts of metrics too.
Morag:
I’d like to hear too how many people come to a community garden and take a cutting to get it happening in their own backyard as well? There’s so many perennial plants that can just have cuttings taken out and be spawning gardens everywhere around the city. That only comes through storytelling, doesn’t it? And being in interviews, it’s a different way of measuring the quantity. But that’s still about the quantity of food. But it’s not all in that measurement. It’s like you can’t measure the quality of wellbeing in Australia by measuring our GDP. It just doesn’t work, the kind of metrics are all wrong.
Gavin:
Although that particular metric is all wrong, GDP, and I think a lot of people don’t understand that we’ve got a big problem with that. Yeah, so metrics is only part of the story. It’s the conversations, the stories we’re getting from people involved in the experience. They’re really important too. And both of them collectively add up. Talking to the government, talking to decision makers about the benefits and that’s what some of these leading organisations overseas, some in Australia do really well to communicate those messages in a very effective way.
So anyway, we digress, we were talking about food. I’m gonna go into the fourth benefit, capacity building. This is all about community capacity, increasing our ability to know about food, to grow food and to generally become more autonomous and skilful people. When I was in Miami, I was with this tremendous program called Food Forests for Schools Program. So this is an organisation that’s to date installed 28 food forests in elementary schools. In Miami, they’re aiming to get it up to 51 in Miami County.
The food forests are very integrated into the school, they wrap around the buildings, they’re part of everyday life, the kids see them all the time. The kids are learning in the garden, they’re learning their science, maths and biology with approved curriculums in the gardens – their scores are going right up. But the other thing they’re learning about is nutrition and how to grow food. They’re getting lessons from really inspiring teachers and they’re also taking food home to Mom and Dad.
Morag:
What a brilliant project!
Gavin:
It is an amazing program. One of the really delightful stories I heard was, a lot of these kids come from poor neighbourhoods. They come from immigrant families from the Caribbean, Cuba or Central America and they’re living with the extended family. So Mum and Dad, Grandma and Granddad, they’ll know about the foods being grown in the food forest, because that’s what they used to grow back home. But Mum and Dad might not. So the story I really love that I heard was that in some of these households, Papa or Mama is teaching the kids how to use the foods, there’s cross generational stuff that’s going on through food. Really good!
That’s an example of capacity building where the kids are really learning about being more independent, how they can grow food at home. They might only have a small patch where they’re able to do that, but they can grow a little bit. They can grow stuff in the food forests at school, they have after school gardening clubs, amazing stuff going on there. And again, the funding models are all about philanthropy, corporate money, USDA and Environmental Protection Agency money coming in and partnerships with universities.
Morag:
So the schools themselves don’t pay for these, the school gets the programs for free, and the children and the community get involved for free and the organisation that’s running this brings in that funding to enable their team to go out? Do they have teams that stay with those schools? Or do they train up people in the schools to be able to run those? How does that work? Do they keep ranging around them? Tell us more?
Gavin:
Yeah, it’s a fascinating place, isn’t it? So Food Forests for Schools, they have a team of six and they are dedicated to supporting teachers and school admin to continue maintaining the food forest once they’ve been established. Some will be there every year, at certain critical times of the year doing the maintenance on the gardens, because the school teachers don’t have the time. They just decide to come in, do the teaching, maybe teach enough to do an after school gardening club. But the team at Food Forests for Schools, they’ll be there supporting teachers, that’s for sure when they are funded to do that and that’s the power. That’s really the power of this funding model is your offering of service. The school doesn’t have to pay for it. That money’s coming in from the general society which I think is a great idea.
Morag:
This service delivery model was something that you wanted to talk about. So this is obviously one of those kinds of models that works to make sure that people who need this or have places that can really be catalysts for change can access this. They have these food forests, which are demonstrations, their education, it’s food security, it’s intergenerational relationship building, it’s all of those things together and that’s valued. What are some of those other models that you’ve seen that are behind making these work? That’s what we need to have to roll out these projects everywhere. That’s what we need to know.
Gavin:
Yeah, so through this overseas work, I developed two different models. Food Forests for Schools is one of the examples of the multiple site service provider. So these are organisations that are providing a service to multiple sites, multiple places. Food Forests for Schools serviced multiple schools, then the orchard project in the UK delivered 540 orchards across the nation in seven different cities, working generally with underprivileged & deprived neighbourhoods for a no cost service. Another group in the Netherlands called Corporate De Underground – 16 food forests in the city of Rotterdam partnering with different groups, installing food forests in a fairly dense urban environment. So they’re multiple site service providers, their funding models are generally the same, the Rotterdam models are a little bit different.
The genius is providing a service for no or low cost, getting your funding coming from other sources and building a story that the general society believes in. Like ‘I want to be involved in that. I’ll fund that. That’s a great idea!’ And it’s defendable. You know, there’s no bullshit about it, this is real stuff, we can deliver on the ground, we’ve got the experience, we’ve got the runs on the board. Some of those groups, they took ages to get to that point, I mean you know what it’s like, you’ve been doing this for a long time. They’ve got to a point now where they’ve got a great story to tell. And that’s sort of how it works. So that’s one of the models.
The other model is the urban orchard service provider. So I talked about City Fruit in Seattle, and I also touched on the Life Cycles Project on Vancouver Island. So they’re harvesting the total stock of fruiting trees, shrubs and vines in a region. And again, they’ve got a great story and funders want to come in to fund. They’re helping out people in need, who are generally living in food deserts, where there’s no access to a fresh grocer or the food costs too much to buy fresh food. That’s a great story, so the funders will come in and find that.
So there are two models with that urban orchard service provider model, I think it can only really work in regions where you’re getting tons of yield. It doesn’t have to be apples. In the Pacific Northwest, it’s generally apples, pears, cherries, stone fruit, blueberries, kiwi fruit. Grapes are another thing. Once again, you’ll go into their annual reports and you’ll see all the metrics on all the different fruits they’re harvesting. Very good at recording that. But you know, in our country, in Queensland, it could be mangoes, could be…
Morag:
Macadamias, bunya nuts.
Gavin:
I think about regional Queensland. I think about the town of Bullin for example, remnant mango trees in that area. Now a big mango tree yields a lot of fruit in a season. I think further south, I think olives. I think of all of the olives through the Adelaide Hills. My god there’s so many olives that we could be harvesting.
Morag:
I know through where I grew up in Ringwood I would go ranging around and find all these plum trees. Those really dark purple coloured ones, they were street trees everywhere. They were just planted because they had a beautiful colour but no one ate the fruit or harvested them. You know, wherever you are, you can find something.
Gavin:
Yeah, there’s fruit trees around in every region of course, but I think for this service to be viable, you need to be getting tons of fruit. There’s potential in Australia, but we need to do some more research on what’s viable.
Morag:
Maybe it doesn’t exist yet. But maybe that’s part of the model of actually saying, ‘this is a model that can work. Therefore, we need to encourage more fruit tree planting in public places.’ That could be part of that support, because up until now, it’s not been supported, because there’s not been the infrastructure. So you can say, ‘Okay, we now have a model that can work in tandem with that, we can get rid of the food deserts in the city. Particularly with the cost of fresh fruit, this could be put together as a combined package to present.’ It might take a while to get off the ground but that way…
Gavin:
Yeah, so we could set up the multiple sites service provider. Now, I’ve had conversations with people in Canberra around this route, setting up something similar to the Philadelphia Orchard Project. We’ve delivered 67 community orchards throughout the city of Philadelphia since 2008. And we see Canberra is something that could be done similarly. We could set up that sort of service delivery model or get community forests all through the city.
Those trees go up, then we could set up an urban orchard harvesting model, as well. Then we can set up some little side businesses and fruit tree care businesses. For example, one of the things I noticed with arborists in our city – another great job – they look after our trees, but that’s specialist knowledge in arborists, looking after fruit trees to increase their production. Arborists generally don’t have that. That’s a real niche that we could be filling out through that model.
Morag:
There are just a few courses out there in terms of urban orchading. I know the Berklee College of Horticulture has started running some really innovative courses in managing urban food systems. So it does require these multiple phases of change simultaneously. I come back to that thing that those bigger conversations need to be had so the work that sustains us can keep going – we need to support and amplify that and have conversations in each of the regions far more often. Like the Melbourne based ones, we need those conversations happening everywhere.
Gavin:
Absolutely. I think that’s going to happen next Urban Agriculture Month. I believe there’s going to be a big forum in Sydney. I’m trying to get the mob up here into Brisbane, we need to have conversations in Brisbane and Queensland, so much potential in our great state. And everything about education! So there’s a certificate in community orchading that’s coming out of the UK. I’m talking to the CEO of the Orchard Project, Cath Roslin, about bringing that program to Australia. Then as the Master Fruit Tree Steward Program comes out of Seattle, I’d love to bring that program into Australia as well. So there’s programs and education out there for that sort of capacity building. That’s another revenue stream for that urban orchading model.
Morag:
Yeah, and how to support teachers as well, like that kind of model from down in Miami. That would be amazing!
Gavin:
There’s a lot of learning about how to develop curricula. Working with the teachers on this is a dynamic duo, Eddie Rosinos and Eddie Lobelo in Miami who just spent major amounts of time working with teachers, developing curriculum, making sure it works for them, making it seamless. You’ve got to make it seamless for those people. And they cracked it, a lot of hard work but they cracked it.
Morag:
That myceliation is what we need, you know? We need education on so many fronts – from education for the policymakers, for those who do the nuts and bolts, those who are rolling out education programs for the children – there’s so many opportunities. This is what I see all the time when you apply a permaculture lens or a community orchard lens to what we’ve got. Now, there are so many niches that need filling, and we need to be in conversation together to bring out this change and make it visible. I guess the other thing that you mentioned too, volunteers and people, what were your inspirations around it? What made people really want to come and be engaged? To keep them engaged and in conversation with each other in a generative way, as opposed to a degenerative, not degenerative, but dissipative is the word I’m looking for.
Gavin:
Yeah, so some of those groups that are there do amazing work. Beacon Food Forests, before COVID, at a typical working bee, they’d get 100 people to a working bee, how did they do that? Post COVID they’re getting 20 to 30 plus numbers are moving up again. So my observations, I do that in a few ways. One of the things is, it’s very simple, they make sure they have fun. So, you know, we’re all busy people, we make choices about our social life. ‘I’m gonna go to the stuff, it’s fun.’ They make sure they have a bit of fun, they’ll do a bit of work and at the end of the work session, they’ll sit up on the benches with an amazing view of the city, they’ll sit back with a drink and a few hamburgers and share some food.
It’s just a really pleasant and convivial atmosphere. So that’s my number one word is ‘fun’ with volunteers – making sure you’ve got your timing right for the volunteers. Making sure that you’ve got your session that works in the neighbourhood, the timing. Beacon runs a session called the Sunset Lab. So the Sunset Lab is where you come down just after work on a Tuesday afternoon. I think it’s not going to get 100 people but you might get 20 to do some work. Again, meeting at sunset, kick back a few beers, off you go, next thing. That’s the kind of thing they do really well.
The other thing that Beacon Food Forests does really well is this inclusive model of sociocracy or dynamic governance, where everyone gets a say in how the place works. Every idea is valued. There’s a process for determining whether your idea is gonna get up all night, you might not but at least people are listened to. And so people, volunteers feel like they own the place. ‘Yeah, I’ve got this sense of ownership in the place,’ they feel that they’re an integral part and they’re really important.
Some of the other groups put volunteers front and centre. Because if you don’t have volunteers… they’re the most important part of the whole operation really. Getting in and putting programs in place to support them. So they’ll be the lead orchard volunteer program in Philadelphia. Those people are getting supported, they’re allowed to act autonomously in orchards all around the city. But there’s this group that’s got their back.
Morag:
I guess with that, too, there’d be some sort of supportive education. So they’re learning great skills that they get to take home, some cuttings or food or other things that they can take back. So there’s that, which to me is such an important part because often people can feel like, ‘Oh, it’s just me coming in here, and I’m doing all the hard yakka.’ But someone else is making it as long as there’s that engagement and I think putting the volunteers front and centre is critical.
Gavin:
So it’s mission critical. The lead orchard volunteers or the neighbourhood ambassadors in Seattle, they’ll get all the training and they’ll get all the equipment. The funds come in, and they’ve got the equipment, and that’s how they’re doing the work. It’s, again, it’s seamless.
Morag:
It’s that autonomy, because with autonomy also comes a level of respect. That level of respect, it’s that purpose, and connection. And it’s really very simple, isn’t it?
Gavin:
That those people are celebrated in the neighbourhoods where they work, as well. You know, there’ll be blog posts going out on social media, all that. That’s all happening. Just lots of different ways of motivating volunteers. The other thing I noticed was by having really cool buildings like bespoke designed structures and spaces that people can come into, they want to be there because they’re just really cool to hang out in. I saw that quite a bit.
That’s another thing that attracts people to a place is we don’t generally see and customise buildings in our urban spaces unless they’re really high end, very expensive, big end of town stuff. Those local, little bespoke everyday neighbourhood structures & buildings are the ones that are really interesting. They caught my eye and certainly other people that will be attracted to those spaces.
Morag:
One of the things that I noticed too, in some of the community gardens in St. Berkeley was just the beauty of the art that entered into the space. So the quality of the mosaics of the centrepiece where people would meet, like you’d sit on these beautifully mosaic seats and a mosaic floor in the middle that had just just an incredible feeling being there. Then when you looked out into the garden space, there were the trellises, where they would be growing up.
They were designed, it was like this web of life of trellis, not just something with a piece of wire stuck out, it was actually beautiful. I think with the buildings like all the infrastructure, with all that thought and presence and bringing in that culture into it, it’s not just a production space. It’s a space that you want to be and express your sense of belonging to a place.
Gavin:
Yeah, exactly. They’re inspirational places that have been crafted.
Morag:
Yeah crafted, that’s the word.
Gavin:
That’s really, you know, they might have a lot of good design thought behind them. But at the end of the day, when you go to build it, there’s a lot of craft that’s going on. It’s often built by the locals as well. So there’s a story behind it as well that people can relate to. I think that’s what really attracts people to this place. Then the volunteers will come in, and want to be there. The combination of all those different things I talked about really works.
Morag:
It’s a process of attraction, isn’t it? Rather than saying ‘we’ve got to do this, we’ve got a job to do’, it’s how to invite people to come and play with you to be part of something that’s going to be really joyful and make you feel like you’re able to make a contribution while really nourishing your your own soul.
Gavin:
Yeah. One thing I’d like to say to listeners and viewers, perhaps a little bit controversially, is I’m not into this term, the working bee. I’m into this term, the ‘work party.’ Let’s make it a party! You know, let’s make it fun! I think that by changing the words & terminology, the phrases can be really helpful.
Morag:
Yeah, absolutely. Because it does, it shifts your relationship with the concept. And you know, you go along there expecting to have a bit of fun so you bring your sense of humour, you bring the food, you bring up some music and bring your guitar and yeah! So I wonder whether you could just let people know, what’s the best way to get involved in this kind of movement? Either here for the listeners in Australia, but also in other parts.
What’s the way that you are seeing based on this research you’ve just done, now that it’s all fresh for you? How do you see that we can turn up the dial on this and really amplify the community food forest movement around the world? Because it feels like it’s something that for all the reasons we’ve talked about, that it can just be so important and nourishing for communities. Whether they’re urban or rural communities or places of restoration of biodiversity, restoration of landscapes, or also addressing climate change and well-being – all simultaneously with this one kind of concept.
Gavin:
Yeah, I think in some ways, the answer is quite simple. Wherever you live, there’ll be a community to get involved in something. There’ll be a Scout Den or it’ll be Girl Guides, Residents Association, a local library. Have those conversations with those people about ‘learn about this amazing idea called the community orchard! Or the community food forest!’ I think that could be a very good thing to have at the scalp then. Or down at the swimming pool or in a local sanitary or at the footy field or in any leftover space. Probably don’t plant the orchard in the footy field, that might be a problem. But wherever you are. I guess what I’m about is trying to embed this stuff in the everyday fabric that we currently have.
For most of us, we live in a suburban place or an urban place. We’re surrounded by community institutions and are also surrounded by green space. Just have those conversations with people, fight to get the conversation rolling. If you’re involved in community gardening, you already have those conversations about orchards, food forests. Maybe they don’t have one of them yet, or maybe they’re thinking about a different way of doing things. Moving away from the vegetable patch, going into more tree-based perennial food growing systems like the orchard or the food forests, to start having those conversations.
You can go to my website and look at my report and other people’s as well. All of the technical information is out there for how to do it. We have great designers here who know how to design a food forest technically. We’ve got a lot of good information about food forests and how to create them. But I think initially, it just started in the conversations. We also have stuff about all this learning about fundraising and motivating volunteers, these other sorts of challenges, how to overcome them. Go from there, that’s where I would start. Where you’re at, wherever you’re at. That’s the place to start.
Morag:
Yeah! Because you already have a set of relationships and a sense of belonging and that is the place to begin always isn’t it? With what you have with people that you know, and just start to let it roll from there
Gavin:
Obviously, if your kids are going to the local primary school and they don’t have a Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden yet, maybe get that started.
Morag:
For example, if there’s a group of people who go to their school and say, ‘Yes, we like this idea, can you bring in a video or examples of this?’ What would you point to if there was a group that was showing interest but needed more visuals and there’s not another in their local neighbourhood that they can just go and visit? Where would you point people to so they could say ‘okay, let’s have a little video day, or watch some videos, we’ll talk about this and we’ll see what we can imagine for our site.’ Where would you send people?
Gavin:
Okay, specifically for a school, you can go to my website and click on my YouTube channel, and I’ve got some videos of a couple of the school gardens in Miami. Also read my report specifically, I have a case study report. If people want that they can email me and get that case study report and read about the Food Forests for Schools Program. Go to the Food Forests for Schools website as well. There’s a couple of great videos on that webpage. Food Forests for Schools sits within the Education Fund, they’ve got a much bigger fund in Miami, but they’ve got a webpage just dedicated to Food Forest for Schools. They’re a unique program, I’ve not come across another food forest growing program in the world like that.
In Australia, we have the fabulous Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden program, more of a program dedicated to raised garden bed box gardens with vegetable growing and I think fruit trees as well. So that might be a starting point.
Morag:
Just taking a look at your report and all the different examples. And then like you said, your YouTube channel, you’ve got clips from many in the different places that you’ve visited. So that will be a good link and then launching from your report to many of the other different examples around.
Gavin:
Absolutely. Yeah, the more conversations, the better. I’m all about getting projects on the ground. All this research and stuff is great, we know that we need to do a lot more case study research, but I’m really into project delivery. I come from a project management, engineering, landscape architecture background, and that’s my focus – getting more and more projects happening on the ground.
Morag:
Yeah, great. Let’s see how we can make that happen. That’s so exciting. I think it’s just been wonderful that you’ve had this journey to bring all of that together, take the time to think this through and get some strategic points of where we can go, ‘Ah, right, that’s where we need to pay attention to this, these are the key things.’ I think, often we spend our time going out into the world and visiting places, but actually coming back and having, like the Churchill Fellowship, the opportunity to report back. Thanks for taking that time to do that, Gav.
Gavin:
Yeah, and as I was saying before, I’ve been thinking about the Churchill Fellowship for 10 years. I’ve been reflecting for a long time about the gaps in our knowledge about delivering community food projects in a more effective way. And so they were the things I was targeting, governance, and how all these people make a quid? How do they fundraise their operations, manage volunteers? How do they give volunteers confidence to go up a ladder harvesting apples, three metres off the ground? Just, how do they do that? So really, reflecting a lot on that. And COVID was interesting too, because it delayed when we went overseas, but that was actually a good incubator, thinking even more about our project. I think in the end, it’s got a much better outcome as a result.
Morag:
Yeah. Great! I’m sure people are really interested in having you as a guest speaker to share your results. Are you open to that, if people have organisations for you to speak at?
Gavin:
I’m on the road showing what I’m doing at the moment, I’m trying to get around as many places as I can, whether it’s in person or online. I’m also doing some ABC Radio stuff. I think that I’m doing something for outback Queensland radio tomorrow afternoon. Yep. I want to get out to regional radio and just talk about this stuff and get people enthused and excited about it.
Morag:
Yeah, brilliant! Okay, so listeners, if you just heard that, that’s an open to get in touch with Gav to see how you can activate your community food projects, your many fruit orchards and food forests! Here in Australia, at least, and you have the possibility to zoom out to anywhere in the world as well. So, yeah, absolutely!
Gavin:
And talking to people who might be interested in setting up a regional-based service, service delivery organisation. I’d be really keen to talk to folks like that. I’m talking about some flights to Canberra about setting up an orchard organisation. So really keen to have those conversations as well.
Morag:
I guess part of what you’d be doing too, is keeping those different projects networked so that they lift each other up as well?
Gavin:
Absolutely and talking to peers overseas to bring their expertise into our country and getting them involved as well.
Morag:
Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time today to chat with us about this incredible work! I can imagine the possibilities – if you put the community food forest lens on as you walk down your street today, see what happens! It’s quite amazing when you do that. Thank you Gav.
Gavin:
Yeah, thanks!