Celebrating World Food Day with Farm My School

Farm My School Image 2023-10-12

Imagine a school that can feed its community.

Today is World Food Day and the Geelong Community Foundation is proud to shine a light on the work of Farm My School, a food literacy program that aims to change the culture of what households are eating, especially in low socio-economic communities and households that are financially stretched.

At its core, the initiative seeks to address the broken food system and provide nutritious seasonal vegetables to the Bellarine Peninsula community, while also providing educational opportunities to the students at Bellarine Secondary College.

Farm My School co-founder James McLennan, said that there is growing recognition of the need to reorient food systems so that they address food insecurity and environmental degradation.

“Communities are the key to localising food in an equitable way,” he said.

“Schools provide a unique opportunity to engage children, families and communities in promoting healthy food systems.”

Geelong Community Foundation CEO Gail Rodgers, said that the effective engagement with Bellarine Secondary College students was a key element of the grant application submitted by Farm My School, and which highly impressed the grants committee.

“With poor diet and obesity critical challenges for many members of our community, educating young people about food security and the benefits of healthy, fresh food will change health and wellbeing outcomes in the future,” she said.

Farm My School was co-founded by James McLennan, a sustainability consultant and educator, and Ben Shaw, a permaculture educator and advocate, after the pair were fed up with the absence of and accessibility to local, fresh, nutritious health food in the Geelong region.

“The idea to build a farm within a school made perfect sense,” said James.

“Our kids are our future and the ones that will bear the brunt of climate change. In essence, we wanted to create a farm at the heart of a community that would also be nurtured, celebrated and loved by its community, with the hope of inspiring others to do the same.”

The duo were seeking a future-focused solution for climate mitigation and looked to schools as having land access that could be utilised for local food production using regenerative practices.

“We saw an opportunity to integrate our program with school curricula and engage students in understanding food growing, preparation and waste practices,” said James.

One of Farm My School’s initiatives is the Farmer Incubator Program, which will see the development of tertiary agricultural/horticultural vocational pathways and provide youth with opportunities to complete farming traineeships. This will involve developing, certifying and delivering vocational education via a Regenerative Farming subject and training (VET), offering two traineeships annually.

“The provision of alternate educational pathways will help ensure students stay at school longer and progress into fields of interest such as horticulture, agriculture and farming, options that may not have been on the student’s radar without immersion in the Farm My School initiative,” said Gail.

The Farm My School team is on track to deliver the first pilot program in the Geelong region, with the vision of scaling up the program into other schools.

“Increasing engagement and ensuring accessibility for all is a key part of the initiative,” said James.

“Education through a number of mechanisms will be the crux of the program to ensure food literacy of the community evolves.”

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