Plots to Thicken Community - Rich deming at tedxcharlotte

Hi! I'm gonna start with three assumptions. Our global food system is a mess and we know it. Chances are you're buying food that is convenient and cheap, but damaging to the environment and yourself. Right now poverty is at record levels, it's number two, 15% of the population and 20% of children are currently in poverty. Number three, food deserts are pockets in our urban landscapes where people don't have access to decent food. I learned about these about 5 years ago when I was working in a blighted area of another city, and I realized that the people I was working with don't have transportation, and also that they don't have... - that's not the right slide - that they don't have access to anything better much than a pig's feed or a Twinkie. Anyway, the idea I wanna talk about today is at the intersection of those three situations. I'm the co-leader of Slow Food Charlotte. Slow Food Charlotte is the local branch of an international organisation that promotes food that is clean, good and fair. Three years ago, we conceived the Community Garden Collaborative. That effort was to take and support community gardens around town. Now community gardens are more interesting than you might think. They provide a venue to form and to grow community, they also provide a place for individuals to learn skill sets that are ancient, and they empower individuals to not be disempowered consumers of our food system. They also are great math, you can take 10 dollars worth of seeds and create 100 dollars worth of foods. While we were learning our lessons out there, we were called by the Friendship Trays, which is the meals-on-wheels project here in town. Friendship trays deliver 700 meals and they were gonna take this yard and make it into a garden to put food into these trays, and deliver it to people who have no access to food. Now, clearly, that is a great project, and we were all in from the start. So the friendship garden is a journey rather than a destination. So we started by putting in a water catchment system, then we took a lot of pallets we found in the area, and we made garden beds out of them, and that was pretty seriously ugly, so we went back and tore out the garden during one of the planting cycles and we started again a much nicer looking garden. And we threw a huge party in order to raise money to pay for that. It was last October. Since then, we have put composting systems in several different areas, including permaculture, we are putting logs where we grow mushrooms to put into the trays, and we threaten ourselves daily with bees and fish farming. About a year ago, a couple of members of the Women's Impact Fund, which is a group here in town that does amazing work, called us and told us we should really be applying for one of those grants. And as we wrote that application, we decided that we wanted to create a network of gardens around town and we wanted to support those where they were long-term and sustainable. So we did that, and the fund was able to fund us 70,000 dollars which we used to hire a couple of people who do some amazing work implementing this vision. So we are well on our way, our first goal which was to transplant 7,500 dollars worth of vegetables from the gardens into the meals of Friendship Trays. We've built up 4 community gardens, and they in turn are dedicated to reverting the bulk of their food to the trays. More than a garden, we are building a replicable example and a network. We're working on guidelines for when and how to support gardens. We're working on transportation systems to get the food from there back to the kitchen. We're working on guidelines on how to train individuals to provide expertise to these gardens. Now we are focused on coordinating our efforts with other like-minded organisations and people in our area. We're working with the county jail to take labor from inmates and grow plants for our gardens from seeds that we give them, which is a very rewarding part. We're working with children all over this town to teach them that carrots come from the ground and not from plastic bags. And we're working with several area churches to get them to donate a row of their existing garden and use our system to put the food from those gardens into the trays. So, anyway, as we establish our systems in a routine, since we get our mojo, we are dreaming bigger. We're looking for a little bit of bigger land in city limits that somebody would donate to us, to really would ramp up some food production. We are looking to the idea of a cannery so that people who are cooking in the Friendship Trays Community Gardens can actually save it for later. And we're meeting often to plan our party which happens in about 2 weeks. You can find out about all of this at our website, which is also a nucleus of the community, that we have here about 1,000 people, like-minded individuals at the Slow Food Charlotte. So as I often do, and who doesn't, I would like to end with a quote from Winston Churchill, who said, "War is the natural state of man, war and gardening." And I just checked a couple of days back and we have 27 wars going on in the world today, so my idea is that we gear up and do little more gardening. (Applause)