Working where it counts…
Conference opens new paths for community food initiatives, permaculture
IT WAS Sorell councillor Melinda Reed who announced the intention to the Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania conference. It came as a bit of a surprise. There were two of those.
Melinda is associated with the Okines Neighbourhood House in Dodges Ferry on Tasmania’s southeast coast, one of a network of neighbourhood house community centres and social service providers throughout the state.
Okines, like many of Tasmania’s 35 neighbourhood houses, is an example of multiple use with its community food garden, food co-operative, room hire, breakfast club, cooking classes, movie nights, school holiday and health and wellbeing activities. Not all neighbourhood houses have that full range of services, however community gardens are a feature of some, like Dunalley Neighbourhood House less than a half hour drive away towards the Tasman Peninsula. Dunalley offers an op-shop, food co-op, free frozen meals, NILS Loans (Nils is an interest-free loans scheme for people earning less than $50,000 a year to enable them to purchase essential needs), family support assistance, playgroup and computer and wifi access.
Okines Community Garden was the dinner venue on the first night of the Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania conference. People were treated to pizza cooked in the garden’s wood-fired pizza oven and chocolate-coated ‘truffles’ while accompanied by a local singer on guitar.
Sustainable Living was the theme of this year’s conference. For the first time, Community Gardens Australia (CGA), the national networking and advisory body for community-based urban food production, was a partner organisation as well as a presence through its CGA Tasmania unit. The conference venue was the recently-completed Iron Creek Farm Stay, a development that combines the large stone fruit orchard previously on the site with tourism accommodation that includes significant sustainability design features and that employs around 40 local people.
Sorell mayor Kerry Vincent addressed the conference. He described the challenges of a local government with its budgetary limitations trying to move towards sustainable infrastructure in a town that is experiencing around four to five times the growth rate of the state average. He was followed by the Minister for Local Government and Community Services and Development, Nic Street, who said that Neighbourhood Houses were integral to Tasmanian communities and were the front line of service delivery. He said he was pleased with their association with Community Gardens Tasmania and the national community gardens organisation. The minister officially opened the conference.
Surprise number one
The conference started with a welcome to country by Theresa Sanity who raised the issue of Aboriginal dispossession in that the land is, legally, no longer Aboriginal land to welcome people to.
How Fiona Campbell and I came to be at the conference was thanks to CGA Tasmania coordinator, Jo Dean . We were to assist Jo, however at the last minute she had to unexpectantly travel interstate.
CGA president, Naomi Lacey, was to make a keynote address by Zoom. She is currently in France on a Churchill Fellowship research project into community agriculture .
It was shortly before Naomi’s session that the message came through. Horrors! Jo emailed us to say Naomi couldn’t can’t get an internet connection. What do we do? We spoke to Shelby, one of the conference organisers.
“If we get the powerpoint could we present her talk? ” we suggested.
Good idea, Shelby replied.
“Can’t get onto Naomi to get her powerpoint, Russ. Maybe we just pull something together,” Fiona suggested. Not much time, I said. Should we decline the invitation? But, well, why not do it?
Lunch break saw us planning our hurriedly-organised session, back-of-the-envelope style. Given her background in community education it was natural for Fiona to take the lead in devising our presentation. She is way ahead of me in doing things like this. She will scribble down notes, choose a number of talking points and a devise a running sheet while I’m still mulling over the idea.
With no photos, no powerpoint, we presented the session not as a presentation but as an interview around our five main points:
1. Climate change and food security.
2. Participatory democracy.
3. Ways people get involved in community gardening, other than gardening.
4. Community gardens’ role in waste reuse.
5. The role of Community Gardens Australia.
It worked. There is much to be said for planning presentations over lunch when time constraints force a hasty focus.
Having to do a session when I earlier thought the conference would be a laid-back experience spent doing little more than sitting around, occasionally talking to people and eating the venue’s food
was surprise number one.
A presence of permies
cooperation is more effective than working individually…
Let’s diverge a little to think about the permaculture presence at the conference and how it came to be there.
The presence consisted of:
- Goodlife Permaculture’s Hannah Moloney, who lives not far away from the conference venue in Hobart and whose effervescent personality captured the attention of the audience
- Tania Brooks from the far distant corner of Tasmania that locals call the Northwest
- Fiona and I, the lone male of the troupe.
Hannah started by describing permaculture’s ethics and principles and talking about Okines Neighbourhood House with its food co-op, community garden and other services. She said doing your own permaculture project starts with auditing community needs, getting to know your landscapes and collaborating with people and organisations because cooperation is more effective than working individually. All of this has to be matched to your capacity, and you discover that by starting small, she told the audience.
“It is not perfection, it is ‘good enough’ that is awesome” she said. “We are not here to manage nature. We are nature.”
I have to say a word or two about Tania Brookes. An influential woman in middle age whom I describe as thoughtfully and quietly powerful, her enthusiasm is evident in her participation in a number of organisations in her region of Tasmania, the state otherwise known by the Tasmanian Aboriginal name of lutruwita in the state’s dual naming system.
As became clear during her talk, Tania is no slouch when it comes to community involvement. Tania:
- has been instrumental is setting up the online branch of the Country Womens’ Association (CWA), something that seems to be like a CWA version 2.0
- is associated with the RESEED Centre, a community education initiative of permaculture people and their allies in the Burnie-Penguin region of Tasmania’s Bass Strait coast
- is involved in the permaculture-inspired Down The Road Farm and-education-centre-to-be in the coastal hinterland
- is active with Permaculture Tasmania
- works with Live Well Tasmania, an organisation that , in collaboration with the RESEED Centre, maintains seed libraries in Wynyard and Penguin, the cashless Community Exchange Network Tasmania trading scheme and a community supported agriculture scheme with Down The Road Farm.
Tania speaks of the value of working with people where they are in their thinking and beliefs and of how we can work with people across the political spectrum, including conservatives. In her role with CWA Tania pioneers new territory and new opportunities for both permaculture and the CWA.
What I find interesting is how permaculture practitioners were invited to participate in a professional conference at all. Does permaculture have some relevance to their work? Those attending the Neighbourhood Houses conference were mainly professional community workers and the like who, as the Minister for Local Government described them at the conference, are front line workers with people experiencing economic, social and health challenges in their daily lives. Theirs’ are tough jobs and it was enlightening to hear of their experiences.
Although Fiona and I have used the ethics, principles and ideas of the permaculture design system in our past working lives in local government community education and food systems-focused roles, we found that relating pemaculture principles and practices to community workers can take the permaculture design system beyond the realm of middle class people who do not face significant social, economic and health challenges.
The presence of these permaculture practitioners at the Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania conference brings us to surprise number two.
Surprise number two
Day three. It was time to wrap up a conference that brought people from all over lutruwita to the shores of Iron Creek Bay. Raffle prizes had been drawn and the event took on that winding-down vibe that many of us will have experienced towards the end of multi-day events like this.
Unlike other conferences, and I risk controversy by including permaculture convergences in their number, this one ended with the presentation of recommendations drawn up during its proceedings. The recommendations give direction to the sector for the coming year, destinations to move towards to drive the organisation forward.
As a one-time food security/food sovereignty advocate, one of those recommendations stood out for me. It recognised the existing role of neighbourhood houses not just as focal points in their communities but as food production and distribution centres. It was stated this way:
That Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania seek a partnership with the CWA in supporting food production and food literacy.
I have a lingering suspicion that Tania’s role in CWA branch might have had some influence on this, but maybe I’m wrong. Whatever the reason, the resolution demonstrated the value of collaboration between organisations with overlapping goals. And, in that, lies a clue about how to move towards greater relevancy for other organisations, including permaculture.
The move validates neighbourhood houses’ existing community food program and their association with community gardens. It also holds potential for the Tasmanian team of Community Gardens Australia, something CGA state coordinator Jo Dean is already moving on.
But… that resolution was not surprise number two. That came later.
Let’s move on to a minute or two before the end of the conference, after recommendations for the coming year had been announced. It was then that Melinda Reed stood up to announce another resolution. It was this:
Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania will recommend that the organisation adopts the ethics and principles of permaculture.
An organiser later attributed the resolution to the presence of those four permaculture practitioners. But, how will it come about?
The proposal to adopt permaculture ethics and principles as Neighbourhood Houses own will go to the organisation’s board of directors. With Fiona and Tania, I am to work with Neighbourhood Houses to find the permaculture principles relevant to them in the sets of principles drawn up by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. There is also the interpretation of these principles as to how they relate to Neighbourhood Houses and how they would be enacted.
The value of collaboration
What are the learnings coming from the Neighbourhood Houses conference?
- Integrate rather than segregate—the value of cooperation and mutual assistance
We can accomplish more as a social movement by joining with others even if we don’t tag what we do as ‘permaculture’. To do that, to insist on naming, would be to put form above substance.
It is like Bill Mollison said in his set of principles: Cooperate rather than compete. Or, as David Holmgren put it: Integrate rather than segregate. - Be approachable, listen carefully, don’t be dogmatic
When permaculture people present themselves as reasonable, nonjudgemental, undogmatic and cooperative they open channels of communication and collaboration that enlarge the application sphere of permaculture. - Work where it counts
Taking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a pointer, and in cooperation with existing organisations, directing our permaculture work towards places where basic needs are greater enlarges the application of permaculture and makes it more-relevant to the circumstances that people face in the world. I remember, years ago now, when Bill Mollison was talking to us in Sydney, he said that permaculture is best directed to where needs are greatest.
This is to work where it counts, and that is one of Bill Mollison’s permaculture principles.
Video interviews
Watch interview with Hannah Moloney at the Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania conference: https://communitygarden.org.au/2022/09/neighbourhood-houses-tasmania-2022-interview-with-hannah-moloney/
Watch Tania Brookes talking about her community work: https://youtu.be/p9ns7zEL0Uo
Summary of Fiona and Russ’ interview session
The main points covered in the impromptu session.
Introductions
Fiona: Fiona was the Randwick City Council sustainability educator who developed Randwick Sustainability Hub, part of a multipurpose regional park in the urban east. She taught the permaculture design course and was one of the crew that set up what is now known as Community Gardens Australia. She contriubutes to maintaining and developing the Community Gardens Australia online systems and the International Permaculture Day online presence.
Russ: Russ is a print, online and photojournalist who co-taught the permaculture design course with Fiona through Pacific-Edge Permaculture, and was community gardens and landcare coordinator for City of Sydney.
He consulted to local governments interested in setting up community gardens and developed policy directions, was community liaison for Greening Australia NSW and worked as program manager for Solomon Island food security/farming systems projects and for a waste reduction/small buiness startup based in Lae, PNG.
- Food security in a changing climate
Q: What are the threats we face from a warming climate?
Discussion:
- possible food shortages triggered by heat stress on crops
- inability of crops to naturally adapt rapidly enough to a warming climate
- crop loss due to severe weather events such as flooding, drought, storm and cyclone damage.
2. Participatory democracy
Q: Have we lost the capacity to make decision together?
Discussion:
- in relation to community gardens, we developed a template for new community garden organisations to work collaboratively through the planning process, including landuse and the social planning of decision making
- in Sydney, Paddington Community Garden shares the skills of helping community gardeners deal with disagreement and conflict.
3. Why do people join community gardens?
Q: What have you found from your work about why people join community gardens?
Discussion:
- there are many reasons, one of which is that community gardening is a means of addressing the social isolation that some people feel
- there is also the informal education that happens in gardens — the skilling-up in both gardening and working with other people
- some people bring their art, such as mosaics or botanical drawing and music to community gardens, adding another use-layer to their value as community gathering places
- there are other things like setting up seed libraries to share plants, sharing meals and more.
4. Waste reuse
Q: When you were working for the City of Sydney, what examples of waste reuse did you see?
Discussion:
- all of the community gardens practiced composting organic wastes from their gardens
- some invited people living nearby to put their organic wates into the community garden compost as well
- the City trialled a community composting system in inner-urban Chippendale where local people could recycle their household organic wastes; it was managed by the Sustainable Chippendale community group
- recycled materials were used in garden construction and I developed notes about materials in community gardens.
5. What is the role of Community Gardens Australia in civic agricultre?
Q: As media liaison for Community Gardens Australia, what were some of the requests you received?
Discussion:
- from the media, primarily the question of how many community gardens there are in Australia; journalists need to know this to context a story on community gardening and to gain an understanding of the scale of community gardening
- from people, how to find a community gardens and how to start them; the online community gardens map points people to the gardens and allows new gardens to register their garden; the Community Gardens Australia website has information on starting community gardens
- we developed online information sheets to answer peoples’ most common questions and these can be downloaded from the Community Gardens Australia website
- there are Community Gardens Australia state coordinators who can assist people in their regions
- Community Gardens Australia’s role is in producing advice useful to people getting their community garden started, networking community gardens across Australia and advocating for them.
More permaculture ideas for a better future…
