Next Steps in the Finland Community Food Conversation
We’ve met twice now, first on April 6th and then again on April 28th to talk about local food in our community – what we are calling the Finland Food Chain. Each time was great – lots of people attended and contributed ideas and inspiration. The first event on April 6th was just to get the conversation going. We talked about what the needs are surrounding food in our community.
The priorities or values identified on April 6th were:
- We want the ability to eat healthy local food year round.
- We need more food, farming and gardening related education.
- We need it to be easy for consumers to source food that is healthy and local.
- We need many local growers and producers who are able to make an equitable living and have access to required infrastructure.
- We need infrastructure to enable processing locally grown, harvested, raised, and gathered foods in our own community rather than transporting them far away.
- We need government policies that encourage “our kind of farming.
Many worthy projects were identified at the April 6th meeting. The ones we are starting with are the ones that have people who are willing to put time and energy into figuring out what it would take to make them happen. At the April 28th meeting, we identified working groups, workplans and budgets for a good number of these projects.
The projects we have preliminary workplans for are:
Finland Food Chain documents created at the April 28th meeting
- Wild rice processing/grain storage
- Creating a local producer cooperative
- Community root cellar
- Local producer directory
- Assessing the food volume used by local institutions
- Food hub exploration
- Food curriculum in schools
- Community seed bank
These groups will be working in the next few weeks to finalize their work plans, which will then be assessed at the next Food Chain Brain meeting, which will be on May 22nd at 6pm. Stay tuned for more details.
This is only the first round of projects! We anticipate many more of these smaller pieces that will make up the larger Finland Food Chain happening now and into the future. Learn more about how this is all going to work here.
