Spacing contributor Laura Boudreau is blogging the Creative Places + Spaces Regional Forum at the Artscape Wychwood Barns. Follow her posts on Tuesday and Wednesday to learn more about innovative city-building at the Barns and beyond.
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One of the most exciting community-building initiatives at the Barns is the Green Barn Campaign, a satellite project of The Stop Community Food Centre, a not-for-profit organization that “strives to increase access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds community and challenges inequality” (editor’s note: you can read about The Stop is Spacing’s summer-fall 2008 issue still on newsstands). The Green Barn will feature a 3,000 square foot year-round greenhouse, a pizza-making oven, a teaching-grade cooking facility, a compost demonstration area, and a community dining area. There are only a few green shoots sprouting from the garden trays at this point, but I can already imagine families learning about environmental food production, then making their own pizza dinners with toppings they harvest from the community garden.
The Stop’s Executive Director Nick Saul says that education, particularly of children, will be a focus of the Green Barn. “The more cooking shows we have on TV, the less we seem to know about how food gets from field to table,” Saul says. “We have a societal confusion about food — 1 in 3 kids are obese now. At The Stop, we use food to build community, skills, pleasure, hope, and knowledge.”
To hear more from Nick Saul and see the bones of the Green Barn, check out the video link below. Better yet, come yourself on November 22 from 9am-12pm for the very first Green Barn Farmers’ Market. (Don’t worry — you don’t need to bring your hard hat. It’ll be a while before the Green Barn’s own tomatoes are ripe, but the bulldozers are gone and the walls are up!)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE9PE_u4698&feature=related[/youtube]