All students have opportunities to experience, learn about, celebrate and be nourished by local food; and all schools in our community have access to an inclusive, equitable and collaborative school food ecosystem.
The process allowed many relationships to be built and strengthened and led to the development of Community Connector positions within the community.
Headwaters Food and Farming Alliance (HFFA) is a collaborative of community partners and volunteers that support activities to enhance local food and farming and build a better food system in Dufferin County and the Town of Caledon in Ontario, Canada. We have been progressing the cause of local food and farming education since 2012. HFFA is a project of Headwaters Communities in Action (HCIA), a registered charity and backbone organization supporting citizen-led actions in support of a long-term vision of community well-being.
HFFA was proud to host Ontario’s first Learning Circle for school food, thanks to the amazing partnership and financial support we received from Farm to Cafeteria Canada. The Headwaters Learning Circle met five times between December 2021 and June 2023. Each meeting built upon the last and culminated in the creation of a pilot project called Community Connectors.
The graphic illustration below depicts our first meeting where we explored relationships by discovering who is in the room and who is missing. We created participation agreements, and dreamed big about the future of farm to school (F2S) activities in Headwaters schools.
Our Learning Circle began with the desire to pause, listen, and learn from each other’s experiences, motivations, and challenges. We challenged ourselves to dream big despite obstacles. The vision that emerged from this collective dreaming is as follows:
All students have opportunities to experience, learn about, celebrate and be nourished by local food; and all schools in our community have access to an inclusive, equitable and collaborative school food ecosystem.
Together our Learning Circle committed to the overarching goal of Strengthening Relationships, which we subdivided into three groups in line with the three sisters, an approach to companion planting used by many Indigenous nations that embeds the idea of community, connection and reciprocity:
The Headwaters Learning Circle brought together community organizations, educators, school Board Representatives, parents, Elders, farmers and gardeners from the community.
Using our goal ingredients of corn, beans and squash we created a yummy pilot project soup known as Community Connectors Consommé
Community Connectors (CC) are people who live in our community and have unique farm to school knowledge. They help facilitate, engage, and strengthen connections between schools and the broader local food ecosystem. This includes promoting healthy local food in schools, enhancing student food literacy, fostering hands-on learning opportunities connected to curriculum, adding schools to the national school food map, and supporting a school’s unique food journey. F2S options are endless and can be as simple as hosting a “Kale Day” or as complex as applying for a Farm to Cafeteria Canada Salad Bar grant.
Community Connectors have:
Participants of the circle have been particularly grateful for being able to build relationships, share information, support student learning, and support schools in a variety of tangible ways.
Since the completion of the Learning Circle grant, Community Connectors have kept momentum going. In the future we would like to see this program expand. Having more Connectors to reach more schools would hugely benefit our region. The rebuilding process post-pandemic has been slow, with most schools requiring support to facilitate any food-based curricular or extracurricular activities. Community Connectors provided helping hands to ignite, facilitate, and promote the importance of food literacy and food based programs in schools.
The Headwaters Learning Circle would not have been possible without the guidance and financial support received from Farm to Cafeteria Canada and the backbone support of Headwaters Communities in Action. For these foundational partnerships we are extremely thankful.
We would like to express our gratitude for the land that holds us, the people who came before us, the food that nourishes us, the community members who cheer us on, and the children who make our hearts sing. May we continue to weave a stronger and kinder community together.
