Cultivating — Cooperation, Happiness and Community

Published in

Hope grows in the Garden

7 min readNov 16, 2017

SAIFF is a volunteer center with worldwide roots that strengthens solidarity and neighborly cultivation work of every kind. Urban garden projects combine practical insight into nature’s cycles through play and social meetings across a variety of languages, cultures and generations.

Description of the initiative — the background

The urban garden project takes off from SAIFF’s vision of good local democracy and how, in fellowship, one can contribute and take care of the local environment. SAIFF stands for Sagene Internasjonale og Flerrkulturelle Frivillighetssentral (Sagene International Multi-Cultural Volunteer Center). It was founded in 2008 and is owned by 23 member organizations/groups who share a basic belief in cooperative community work. Initially their perspective was international, but two years ago this vision was adjusted — putting greater weight onto local efforts and the area where SAIFF has its headquarters on Arne Gjesti’s Place, with the Sagene Community Center as its closest neighbor. To a large degree, local residents have become the target group for SAIFF’s activities. In addition to this, SAIFF is a regular participant in several large festivals every year. The largest, Voices from Sagene (Stemmer fra Sagene) takes place in May/June. Along with regular guests, between 50–60 volunteers make themselves available during the District Days in Sagene.

The idea for applying for Green Funding had its origin in concerns about climate change. Member organizations have also been troubled by problems relating to unhealthy food and food waste. ”For us organizations,” Ramil Aliyev, the daily director of SAIFF explains, “it’s important to take the green transition seriously by encouraging consumption of organic and environment friendly food.” Since 2015, subsidies from the district have made it possible to cultivate healthy, organic food on garden allotments available to us in the Geitmyra School Garden.

Each garden plot is 50 square meters. In addition to individual cultivation, there are activities connected to healthy, organic food-making, combined with play and cultural arrangements. The available plots are divided between member organizations and SAIFF. Member organizations apply to develop a number of garden plots. Each organization is managed independently but all are under SAIFF’s overall auspices. Some of these plots are managed by SAIFF, and targeted for specific activities. Among others, the Environment Club was tried out in 2015. Subsequently this ushered in a cooperation with Living Environment Services and a district Youth Initiative and, among other things, is responsible for the ”Environmental-Bosses,” a group of children and young people who are concerned with a cleaner environment. Through these cultivation attempts, the children learn everything from the ground up: that is to say, irrigation, harvesting and food making.

The cultivation project is lead by a coordinator, Mari Andersen and SAIFF. They meet every Tuesday. Some of the children’s parents also participate and take responsibility. Several of the children and their families live in small apartments so the garden plots are welcome oases. By partaking in the cultivation project the parents develop contacts with each other and the earth. They learn about the cycle’s of nature. “We’ve received great assistance from the Geitmyra School Garden”, Ramil tell us, which has implemented courses dealing with both composting and cultivation, first with Tore Faller then later with Nina Berge. “We have also offered cultivation courses for adults, taught in such a way that the adults could later communicate their knowledge and initiate and organize follow-up activities themselves.” When the growing season was over, SAIFF arranged a Thanks for the Harvest Festival, where meals were prepared using their own vegetables: cabbage, corn, sugar peas, garlic etc., all contributing to a wonderful harvest soup and a number of salads.

“It was interesting for me and the other adult participants”, Ramil tells us, “to see the children eat this soup with such enthusiasm.” In addition to the soup, pizza was also prepared. The children learned to make their pizza from scratch, which took 6 months, if you include the growing process for the corn for the dough, as well as the toppings. Many children throw away food — this gave them a totally different understanding of what food resources are.

In addition to the cultivation project, SAIFF received funding to make the daily operations of its headquarters greener. In this regard, a special emphasis was put on how garbage was handled both inside and outside SAIFF´s buildings. A number of planter boxes were distributed by the district so that plants might be cultivated and made to look attractive.

The purpose of this project was for both the children and SAIFF’s users to respect the environment and not just throw things away, rather sort their waste and understand why this is important. Urban Waste Disposal (Renovasjonsetaten) produced brochures about this in various languages: Somali, Turkish, Russian and others.

Experiences that others can learn from

The cultivation project has been so successful that it is expanding further. We’ve learned to cultivate edible fruits and vegetables that members and participants know from their own home countries. Not all of these plants have the same favorable conditions in Norway that they had in the home countries. At the same time, we have seen that some folks are very clever at encouraging growth. They make use of cultivation methods that they learned in their home countries, and pass this knowledge on to their garden plot neighbors.

There were greater challenges with the project: ”A Greener SAIFF.” This didn’t work as well as we had hoped, Ramil says. It’s something of a learning process. We observed that waste was being thrown into the wrong containers. We needed to find better solutions. During our bi-annual volunteer work days, arranged in the autumn and spring, we tried to focus on issues pertaining to waste. The work days are a cooperation between Living Environment Services and the Sagene Community Center. To encourage engagement, an important aspect of this is that the work days are always combined with serving food and cultural events.

We planned to take 15 young people with us to the Urban Waste Disposal facilities and to other agencies that handle waste, to show that not everything can be burned, but we didn’t have time to do this. We felt that observing the whole process would be essential to their understanding. But limited time is a factor that needs to be taken into account; much has to be scheduled in advance. Our hope is to follow through with this visit in the course of implementing our next project, Ramil tells us.

Much time and energy goes into applying for funding for the various projects. Daily leaders are the only employees receiving salaries. All the rest of the activities are based on voluntary efforts with some remunerations via allotted project funding. The board meets 7 times a year and shares responsibility for all the activities. The locales where the board meets are owned by Residential Construction (Boligbygg). The board receives some discount on the rental costs, but it is still quite expensive. About 60% of received allotments from the state goes to salaries and 40% goes to rental costs. Additional expenses have to be covered by other funding. In addition to the cost of renting, there are a number of fixed expenses, among other things, for cleaning services. We are rather attractive because our locales are so large. We’ve been lucky to have engaged volunteers, but sometimes we have to cover direct expenses as well — for example, food when the volunteers are there for longer periods.

Future visions — from next year through 2030

We’ve applied for new funding in 2017, Ramil tells us. Over the winter we plan to arrange courses with the themes: ”Cultivation in the Norwegian Climate” and ”What is Organic Food?” In addition to this, he would like to continue the initiative Feast against Famine (Matgilde mot Hungersnød), which Svein Elias Gautefall originally initiated. (see narrative: From Grassroot to Green Entrepreneur). So much edible food is thrown away and many of our users and neighbors have large families but little means. We would like to initiate a project where we make agreements with local grocers about procuring food whose use-by dates have expired, Ramil tells us. We initiated a similar mini-project a little while back. A woman who used to live nearby worked at a hotel. She contacted SAIFF. A fair amount of freshly baked bread wasn’t consumed at the hotel. For a period she delivered this excess bread to SAIFF who introduced the campaign: If you need — help yourself. This was unbelievably popular. The woman has since moved from the district, but she gave us a good idea that could be developed. Ramil would also like to attach a creative workshop to the cultivation project where one could bring attention to other recycling efforts, for example, the recycling of metal containers.

As for his vision leading up to 2030, Ramil imagines a SAIFF that has become a proficiency center for district volunteers. They would offer courses and seminars. They would have a course in building organizations and a strong platform for volunteers who work across disciplines. The district will give us even more attention and will use its resources in the right way. We will give a great deal back to the district. It’ll be fun to run SAIFF. We will continue to believe in humanity and in giving and taking responsibility. We will meet people and create networks. Society changes quickly. Much time is being wasted. We’ve managed to keep up with the times and recognize that the classic model for volunteer work is changing — we’re good at testing the needs of the volunteers who have limited time and resources, that is to say we have ”specialized” in such a way that volunteer efforts can be used to different extents and for different tasks. In 2016 the area outside SAIFF’s headquarters are more or less just a space for cars. By 2030 the cars will be gone; it will becomes a place where children can play, a place for cultivating flowers and filled with edible plants. In addition we will have gotten a nice kitchen that can serve food. We will have started up social entrepreneurial projects.