Cold Storage for the Win at Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw School

Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw School, Port Hardy, BC
Grant term, 2024-2025

The Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw School is on the Tsulquate Reserve in Port Hardy on Vancouver Island. It is an independent school operated by the band. There are 135 students from Pre-K to Grade 7 who attend the school. We already have a flourishing garden and greenhouse, as well as a great composting program run by the students in the school. We also have a new cafeteria that was built during a school expansion two years ago. As we’re learning to manage all of these things as a school, we’re learning about the needs of the kitchen and how we can best use the food we grow during the school year for the cafeteria.

We are also fortunate to run a summer learning program out of the school, where we utilize the garden and cafeteria space for learning about growing. Although we cycled through several different ideas for how to spend the grant money, some were not practical, and some were not as effective as we had hoped. We finally decided on a commercial fridge for the cafeteria to store our garden produce and other refrigerator items. Pictured is Ashton Wilson, who was a former student at the school and is now the prep cook for the cafeteria. He said that he “loves the new fridge, it’s way better than the small white ones.”