An exciting opportunity for the summer
We have an exciting opportunity this summer to partner with the SAGE Center (Sustainable Agriculture Education) to take on several acres of farm land in Sunol (about 30 minutes south of Oakland) to increase our food production and provide a hands-on training environment for young people in sustainable food systems. Sage is developing the concept of Urban EdgeAgricultural Parks or AgParks, which are basically a way to establish agriculture as a valued urban-edge amenity that is part working farm and part parkland. SAGE recently came out with an “Urban Edge Agricultural Parks Toolkit” which introduces the components of the AgPark model, a step-by-step process for setting one up and case examples of similar projects. Learn more about it: Projects of SAGE- Sustainable Agriculture Education.
People’s Grocery’s involvement is tentative however as we have not yet secured the funding to support the expansion to the Sunol site, or to hire additional staff support for it. But we’re hopeful that we will get the funding as this is a tremendous opportunity for both expanding the capactiy and impact of our organization, and strengthening the local food system through a urban and peri-urban relationship. Keep an eye on this one.
April 17th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Congratulations on the site. What’s new at the Grocery? Brahm are you taking the helm for awhile, or is it permanent?
April 17th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
Congratulations and great work building the blog PG and YVOD. It looks great. The SAGE opportunity is really exciting. We need more organic produce. Please grow as much as you can!
April 18th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Hi Kent-
Good question. A great deal is new at People’s Grocery, including a new snack delivery program to the Oakland Unified School District in which we’re delivering healthy snacks to the after school programs at 11 schools. Picture 1070 children eating healthy snacks every day! This is a big step in the right direction for getting better foods into the schools and we’re happy to be doing our part. It’s also the first viable revenue generating project that People’s Grocery has pursued, and is helping strenghten our financial perfomance and foundation as a social enterpise - which will, of course, be very helpful in the future when we begin to seek capital for the development of a cooperative grocery store. More to come on that front soon….
It looks I’m taking the helm for a little while at least. I had never planned to be a solo Exectuive Director and had grown very accustomed to having Malaika as my Co-Director. She and People’s Grocery are very intertwined in my mind - I guess working with someone for almost 5 years on a single project will do that. And I never imagined that we wouldn’t be able to replace Malaika with another co-director. As some of you may know, we did in fact hire someone as a new Co-Director to take Malaika’s position. Her name is Pat Brown. While she is very committed to the work we do, she was unable to remain in the position due to personal reasons. But Pat is now on our Board of Directors, which is a great way for her to stay in leadership and share her wisdom with us. So for nowit;’s just me as the ED. Hopefully that will change in the future as we build the leadership capacity of our staff. I have my eye on a few people who may be able to join me at the helm in the future…and ideally take the role of leadership over entirely at some point.