Category: Partnerships

Giving Tuesday

December 4, 2024

At this time of year, we get a lot of signals from nature to slow down. Days are shorter, temperatures are cooler, and plant growth has slowed. I put my garden plot to “bed” by adding leaf mulch. We’re lucky to live someplace where you can do winter gardening (and Kayla directed me towards some gorgeous parsley, broccoli, and cauliflower at our August Plant Sale that I popped into my plot), but I’m also feeling grateful to have one less thing to do over the next few months.

I had a great time gardening this spring and summer, but I also didn’t quite give my garden the attention it deserved. I added the gardening without taking something away, and as the summer got busy with activities, maintaining my plot became another item on my to-do list. I wanted to be productive, and I wanted the space to be successful. But I didn’t carve out the time necessary to be present and to get to know what my small patch of green needed from me to thrive. I grew a surprising number of tomatoes and made numerous batches of pesto, but I can only thank the plants for thriving under my benign neglect. As often is the case, I could have done more by doing less.

I’m trying to hold on to that lesson – do more by doing less – even though I’m getting a lot of signals to pick things up. There’s Halloween candy to eat, Black Friday goods to purchase, and holiday shopping to do. ‘Tis the season of over consumption! What can you and I do in this moment to reconnect to the signals from nature?

Rest

I invite you to slow down! Daydream. Take a nap. Heck, make it possible for someone else to take a nap. Tricia Hersey, the brilliant mind behind the Nap Ministry, has shared that rest has an ecological component: when we rest, the Earth rests. How lovely is that!? So: cozy up, folks.

Donate

Consider donating to the causes you love. We’re so grateful to have been chosen by the volunteers of the Seedy Saturday organizing committee to be the backbone organization of the 2025 event. In parallel to the leaf mulch on my garden plot that’s recharging nutrients for a productive growing season next year, the volunteers are putting in time and energy over the winter to make the spring 2025 event a success.

The folks on the committee are giving their time to organize this event, and I invite the rest of us to do what we can to make the event happen. The committee would appreciate donations as small as $5, which will go to ensuring that this community event can happen in February 2025! Make a tax-deductible charitable donation to Seedy Saturday through our fundraising page.

Low-Impact Gifting

If you are a gift giver, think about items that are low impact e.g. locally sourced, secondhand, fair trade, etc. If you can, give the gift of time.  In a world where there’s so much STUFF, think about giving someone an experience or quality time spent together. If you’re like one of my brilliant colleagues who spends this quiet season knitting, carving, weaving, and shaping clay, think about taking on a craft. As part of our site shift (which you may have seen or even heard), we said goodbye to a gorgeous eucalyptus tree. We were able to chip a lot of the eucalyptus tree, and we’ve spread those chips around the site where they will continue their life as they decompose and build soil. We’re also selling larger milled pieces as a fundraiser for our Child and Youth Education Program. Consider buying some mementos of this tree for your next carpentry project.

—

Let me know what you think! Do you have other ideas for how to reconnect to nature at this time of the year? I’d love to hear them.

Love,
Claire

Collaboration Spotlight: ReWood and the Compost Education Centre

January 6, 2024

ReWood is a volunteer-led social enterprise that aims to give old wood a second life by liberating lumber from building sites before it is transferred to the landfill. We have assembled a small but mighty volunteer team with the time, skills, and energy needed to design and custom-build strong and durable wooden infrastructure products for use in community gardens, small urban farms, nurseries, and related social enterprises.

We connected with the Compost Education Centre in November. Within a week of our initial meeting, we were already at work: we delivered over 70-feet of freshly salvaged 2x4s for use in building support stands for the CEC’s in-classroom worm compost bins. We hope to collaborate further on projects of mutual interest where we can contribute to each other’s success.

Two Challenges, One Solution

Through a FED Urban Agriculture-sponsored research project, Community Garden Guide, ReWood’s founders found many challenges confronting the establishment of community gardens. A key challenge was the ability to design, fund and build solid, common infrastructure like garden boxes, compost bins, and fencing. We found that wood costs alone accounted for roughly 25% of the build budget of the new Central Saanich Community Garden (CSCG).

At the same time, we were watching the demolishing of more and more residential properties in our neighbourhoods. Recent data from the Capital Regional District (CRD) estimate that unsorted wood accounts for almost 20% of total landfill-destined waste!

We saw two challenges that could be solved with one solution. Last year, we worked with the CRD and individual contractors to salvage wood from local demolitions including from the Capital Regional Housing Corporation project occurring adjacent to the Compost Education Centre’s site at 1216 North Park St. We diverted wood from the landfill to build garden boxes and compost bins designed by our volunteer team.

Waste Diversion Collaboration

Both ReWood and the CEC are grateful to be supported by the CRD’s Rethink Waste Grant. ReWood aims to divert wood from the landfill through direct projects, and the CEC seeks to divert organics from the landfill through education and research. It was awesome to find an opportunity to support our mutual goals. We’re interested in more future collaboration!

By Stuart Culbertson, volunteer lead at ReWood

Interested in getting involved? Contact us at [email protected] if you would like more information about donating salvaged wood or sourcing reclaimed wood for a community garden or urban farm.

Let’s Make It Rot – Together

January 1, 2024

The Compost Education Centre launched Let It Rot! (LIR) in collaboration with a group of students at SJ Burnside Alternative Secondary School (SJ Burnside). LIR is an experiential learning program through which high school-aged youth acquire skills and knowledge on topics including composting, waste reduction, soil science, permaculture, and ecological stewardship. Now in its third year of operation, Elora Adamson, the CEC’s Child and Youth Education Program Manager, delivers lessons weekly to two cohorts of students at SJ Burnside and Mount Douglas Secondary School (Mount Doug).

We had launched the program because we had received feedback from student learners and teachers that teens need longer periods of time and relationship-building to more fulsomely connect with the resources that the Compost Ed Centre offers. We heard that students want to get their hands dirty, apply knowledge and skills in a tangible way, and build community around the intersection of food and climate justice. I’ve been so excited to see how Elora manages this program in a way that has had rippling effects. For example, upon graduating from SJ Burnside, an LIR alumni immediately found employment in the food security and food waste sector, which she was inspired to seek out after her experience in the program.

It is clear that LIR has deep impact on the participant students and their communities. Earlier this year, we started to wonder about all the other student communities at the nine other secondary schools in School District 61. How can we scale up our engagement of youth in gardening, composting, and conservation activities in educational gardens? Educational gardens are powerful outdoor learning environments for fostering climate action. How can we effect more climate change mitigation and adaptation by growing our Let It Rot! community?

To answer these questions, we started talking to longstanding food security organizations like CRFAIR, exciting new initiatives like Flourish School Food Society, long-time friends like Lifecycles, passionate teachers like Annalee Tyler at Reynolds Secondary School, and progressive funders like the Victoria Foundation. What we found is that we all care about transforming disconnected youth into engaged stewards of our world – and that there is an opportunity to progress towards greater collaboration and integration. By aligning our program delivery and participating in ongoing strategic discussions, we can focus more on impact and less on duplicating efforts with regards to funding, community focus, and capacity.

With the generous support of the Victoria Foundation, we’ve started exploring these questions and implementing strong collaborative practices. The latest (and so exciting!) update is that the Compost Ed Centre and Flourish have co-hired a garden coordinator to manage multiple school garden spaces. It’s exciting to think that we’ve managed to avoid some redundant administrative work and pool resources together to create a new job in the food literacy sector.

We aspire to connect students first to local natural processes and then second to big ideas like climate change. By demonstrating hands-on, regionally specific, and solution-driven practices through our educational approach, we try to reconnect youth to land and nature in a meaningful and productive way. By educating youth about the importance of sustainable agricultural systems, the science of compost, the benefits of native plants, and the importance of waste reduction and conservation, we are equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to build healthy communities with resilient local food systems.

We are so grateful to find ourselves in community with a growing number passionate student learners, dedicated teachers, and nimble organizations. We’re looking forward to even more!

By Claire Remington, Executive Director

Seven Years of Success with the Healing City Soils Program

October 1, 2023

The Healing City Soils (HCS) program dismantles barriers to people growing their own food; educates on how soil health is vital to local ecosystems, community wellbeing, and climate change mitigation; and builds community around restoring damaged soils. The program is a partnership between the Compost Education Centre (CEC) and Royal Roads University (RRU). On August 28^th, the HCS community came together at Hatley Castle on the RRU campus to watch – and celebrate – undergraduate environmental science students present the results from the program’s seventh successful year of implementation.

Soil testing can be expensive, and the results are often complex, confusing, and disheartening. The uncertainty of soil contamination, the expense of soil testing, and the opaqueness of soil testing results are all barriers that prevent people from growing their own food. The RRU students addressed these barriers and furthermore, they educated on the importance of soil health. There were other environmental science students, Capital Regional District (CRD) growers and gatherers, CEC staff, RRU professors and staff, and friends and family in attendance; and the audience walked away with an improved understanding and appreciation for soil health.

Have questions about your soil quality? Stay connected!

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates on Healing City Soils 2024 soil testing

Over the course of eight months, two student groups in Professor Matt Dodd’s environmental science major project course performed literature reviews, designed research questions, learned new laboratory protocols, and engaged in hands-on environmental science.

Both student groups competently explained their science, shared their challenges, provided recommendations for next year’s crop of students, and tackled critical barriers to scaling up sustainable food systems in the CRD.

The first student group focused on providing free heavy metal soil testing of backyards, community gardens, boulevard gardens, and traditional harvesting sites in the Capital Regional District (CRD) to 100 food grower and gatherer program participants; this is part of the CEC’s long-term HCS program. All participants received the results of their heavy metal soil tests alongside easy-to-understand educational materials like the CEC’s factsheet on soil contamination. The results will be incorporated into an interactive online map.

Do you think this research is cool?

Contribute to the sustainability of this program! Become a donor

The second student group was drawn in by the questions of the Ground Beneath Our Feet (GBOF) pilot that the CEC started in 2020; the GBOF group analyzed the potential of using plants, compost, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to remediate soils contaminated with heavy metals. AMF naturally occur in many habitats, and they improve plant nutrition, stress resistance and tolerance, soil structure and fertility. The students maintained three different pilot sites where they tested soil quality and plant tissue for heavy metals, planted and maintained plants hypothesized to be bioaccumulators, and applied compost and AMF. The students found the combination of woolly sunflower, compost, and AMF to be effective in remediating contaminated soils.

We are so grateful to the First West Foundation’s for making this work possible!

By Claire Remington, Executive Director

Finalist for Nature Inspiration Awards

September 21, 2023

Healing City Soils is a finalist for the Canadian Museum of nature’s Community Action Nature Inspiration Award!  The award celebrates community groups who show leadership in taking action to protect wildlife and habitats, training volunteers and citizen-scientists, or in developing new educational programs for children and adults. The Healing City Soils program analyzes the CRD’s soil health, researches how native plants can be used to remediate contaminated soils, and provides plain language resources and resources to households interested in growing their food safely. 

Summer Raffle

July 6, 2022

Did you hear? We’re having a raffle for a brand new cargo e-bike! 

In 2021 the Compost Education Centre began a concerted effort to expand and evolve our Child and Youth Education program, including the crucial addition of a second child and youth educator, Jeffrey Ellom. As a team, Jeffrey and Child & Youth Education Manager, Elora Adamson, have developed a host of new workshops and programs. These include one-off workshops like ‘Bees and Blossoms’, ‘Spectacular Seeds’, ‘Flawless Fungi’ and more! Fundraising from the Summer 2022 E-Bike Raffle will support not only the development of more relevant and exciting science and environmental resiliency workshops for young people, but will also contribute to new programming initiatives such as the ‘Parent-Child Workshop Series’.

Drop by in person, find us at events, or click here to grab your tickets to score this sweet ride.

Winner drawn in September. Thank you to @fairfieldbicycleshop for the generous donation.

1000 tickets, 1 for $2.00; 1500 tickets, 3 for $5.00; 3000 tickets, 10 for $15.00 | BC Gaming Event License #133883 | Winners consent to the release of their name by the licensee. 

*Participants must be 19+ and a resident of BC to enter

What’s all the buzz about bees? Join the Compost Education Centre and the Greater Victoria Public Library to learn about the importance of pollinators and discover little known facts about native bees and the integral role they play in our local ecosystem! We’ll chat about how you can help care for bees, and demonstrate a fun and simple way to make your yard and garden more bee friendly!

Worm Poop Centennial Project

August 25, 2021

It is with much gratitude that we launch the Worm Poop Centennial Project! This project is in partnership with the Victoria Horticultural Society who is celebrating 100 years of hands-on gardening education. Through the VHS’ generous donation we are able to give away 100 worm bins to interested non-profit and educational groups when they book a worm composting workshop with us. Get in touch with Elora, to learn more about this initiative at [email protected]

Healing City Soils Applications Are Open!

February 27, 2020

For more information or to fill out an application, click here.