Archive for the ‘Organizations’ Category
Urban Foraging: A Look at the Deep Connections Between People and Ecosystems in Seattle
Do you fancy a little wild fennel? Pluck juicy berries from nearby shrubs? Gather fallen figs, apples, plums, walnuts and chestnuts? Harvest stinging nettles, dandelion, chickweed, watercress or other edible greens? Use Oregon grape or woodland fungi to dye textile fibers? If so, then you just might be an “urban forager.”
Foraging is a deeply interactive nature practice that links urban residents to the intricate web of urban ecology while improving overall health and well-being. Urban ecosystems yield a bounty of edible, medicinal and useful plants and organisms important to the diverse communities. Forested woodlands, parks, alleys, parking strips, vacant lots and other areas outside the garden provide habitat for well over 250 native and introduced species of plants and mushrooms in Seattle, some which are foraged year-round. Gathering vegetative material serves many purposes, including: providing food, medicine, and raw material, strengthening social ties, and maintaining cultural identity. More…
Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program
The question that gets raised over and over with programs aimed at getting food into people’s bellies is how to sustain these programs in an era when grants and charitable donations are vanishing. To keep these vital programs going, innovative strategies need to be developed, and our friends at City Fruit have come up with a good one.
One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding. More…
Gleaning from the Trees: Community Harvest Update
This summer pears and apples are the darlings of Lettuce Link’s Community Fruit Tree Harvest. We’re missing the Italian prune plum mania of 2009, but love to harvest and donate nevertheless!
Since 2005, volunteers with Lettuce Link’s Community Fruit Tree Harvest have been harvesting urban fruit. Our volunteers make the harvest happen year after year. Thanks to their efforts, tens of thousands of pounds of fruit make it to people rather than rotting on the ground.
This season, we have volunteer harvest leads in Seattle neighborhoods along with fruit harvesters around the city. We’ve been busy harvesting and donating in Ballard, Central Seattle, Capitol Hill, NE Seattle, South Park and Wallingford. More…
Working to End Hunger
Starting back in 2005 with three gardens, Urban Farming is now an international organization that grows food on underutilized land in order to solve hunger. One program they have that’s especially interesting focuses on building edible walls in Los Angeles. To learn more read on:
Urban Farming is an international 501(c)3 organization headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. We bring people together in communities throughout America and abroad to plant food on unused land, space, rooftops and walls, with the intention of ending hunger in our generation, while greening the globe. More…
A Garden for Every Six Americans
The Dinner Garden is a program based in Texas that aims to have one garden for every six Americans. To reach this goal they provide free seeds, garden supplies and loads of great advice. Here is how they got started:
The concept of home and community gardening is not new. However, this kind of gardening has fallen out of practice. The inspiration for this project grew out of two things. First, the economy is in bad shape. We know many people who have lost their jobs and are struggling to make it. They are cutting costs wherever they can. When they’ve stripped their budgets as far as they can go, they are left with deciding between food and rent or food and medicine. More…
Financiers Seeking Sustainable Farms
A conscientious finance firm is taking a look at agriculture, and telling its investors to do the same. RSF Social Finance believes that investing in sustainable farms or food groups focused on community have a lot to offer and will be around in the long run.
This is a good omen for farmers who are putting their heart and soul into working the land now, who may not be seeing frequent paydays.
Here’s some more information from the Civil Eats blog:
RSF Social Finance, a non-profit financial firm focused on using money as a force for good in the world, has announced the launch of a new Food & Agriculture Program-Related Investing (PRI) Fund. The idea is to encourage investors to support elements of the agricultural and food sectors that look beyond the bottom line to take the health of our environment and communities into account. More…
Convince Parks to Let Atlantic City Nursery Get One Step Closer
Atlantic City Nursery Concept Plan
When you think of Rainier Beach, urban farming is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. A group of local community members organized as the Friends of Atlantic City Nursery (FACN) have been working for months to change that perception by advocating that Seattle Parks and Recreation convert the closed Atlantic City Nursery on S. Cloverdale Street north of Beer Sheva Park into the Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands Restoration Project.
The core idea of this project is transforming the existing horticulture buildings for productive and sustainable food-growing to provide healthy food for local food banks and school programs along with job training and youth education opportunities. Just as importantly, the project calls for restoring the acres of wetlands on the site and making them come alive again with native flora and fauna. Social justice, urban agriculture and environmental stewardship all combined in a single project!
More…
New Resource for Volunteer Recruitment
Do you have a community project that needs more volunteers? Maybe a garden clean up or building a new community shed is in order? Then this new resource may be just the ticket. Here’s more from Eva Ringstrom:
Flash Volunteer is a non-profit, volunteer-run website in Seattle that posts neighborhood volunteer opportunities.The events are publicized on the website and also on Twitter, Facebook, and through the free Flash Volunteer iPhone application. More…
Garden Defense: IPMopedia Gives Tips on How to Grow Your Veggies Well
IPMopedia.org, a community-driven wiki website that provides information on non-toxic pest control, sustainable design tips and more, is proud to announce the launch of its Backyard Farmer section. The goal of this section of the website is to provide information and advice for the ever-expanding number of urban, veggie-growing enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest. From growing tips, to educational fact sheets on how to control and prevent pests on your favorite crops, to design guides on edible gardening, this section strives to be a one-stop clearinghouse of quick and easy to understand information to help you and your garden grow a bounty of produce without the use of harmful chemicals. More…
Sustainable Economies Law Center Provides Legal Support for Urban Agriculture Movement
This video is rather unpolished from a graphic standpoint, but once you start listening to the dialogue you realize how informative and sophisticated it really is. Created by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), the video provides a high level explanation of urban agriculture, and covers a variety of ways that city residents and city officials can support growing food in urbanized areas. (Mainly by revising policies that currently restrict or discourage food production.) More…
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