The L.E.A.F. Initiative is a Commonwell program to support capacity, resiliency and growth in the communities we call home.

Learning Circle Supper Club

288 Church Street TorontoM5B 1Z5

What is this project about?

The Black Food Sovereignty Initiatives at the Urban Farm present a unique opportunity for Commonwell to support culturally significant programming that helps build resiliency within the community. The project objectives are twofold: address food insecurity issues in Black and marginalized communities and empower young Black, Indigenous and other people of colour to learn that farming can be economically empowering while serving communities.

Over the last three years, the Harvest Collective and Learning Circle programs have experienced tremendous success and continue to flourish more with each season. We’ve heard from our students and community that soaring food prices continue to be a top concern. As highlighted within the University of Toronto’s 2022 PROOF report (an interdisciplinary food insecurity research program studying effective policy) there are disproportionate rates within Black communities in Canada who are affected by food insecurity. The highest percentage of individuals living in food-insecure households in 2022 was found among Black people at a staggering 39.2% and Indigenous Peoples at 33.4%.

On top of this, Canada is facing a steep decline in farmers. Recent reports show that 40% of Canadian farm operators plan to retire over the next decade with the majority having no succession plan. There is an opportunity for young Black, Indigenous and of other people of colour to fill this gap and serve our communities by producing nutritious, locally-grown food that supports healthy ecosystems and thriving local economies.

The Black Food Sovereignty Initiatives in partnership with TMU’s School of Nutrition plan to build on the success of the Learning Circles and develop a one-of-a-kind Supper Club. The Learning Circle Supper Club will create a shared space for community healing while addressing food security and directly addressing this urgent need.

Launching in the 2024 growing season, the pilot year will prioritize Black TMU students, faculty and staff, to create meaningful change in their lives and within the community. In this first year, we will keep the program intimate with four sessions (June – September) serving 30 participants per session reaching a total of 120 Black students, faculty and staff. Following each session, we will conduct a survey to develop the strategy to expand the 2025 Learning Circle Supper Club. The funding model will include a nominal session fee (students at $15/session and staff/faculty at $20/session).

We plan to expand the 2025 Learning Circle Supper Club to welcome students and community members who self-identify as Black, First Nations, Inuit and Métis as well as other allies of this work. The 2025 season will expand the number of sessions to six including a special Black History Month celebration in February and then five sessions during the growing months (June – October). In 2025 we plan to reach 180 community members.

The three hour sessions will take place in the School of Nutrition’s state-of-the-art food labs and will be led by Black chefs, dietitians and nutritionists to create culturally-significant recipes from around the African diaspora using food freshly harvested from the Urban Farm! The School of Nutrition has generously agreed to offer the food labs as an in-kind gift towards the program thus lowering the overall expenses of the program.

The program has been intentionally designed to provide a range of cooking and food literacy skills and provide access to the facilities and equipment that some may not usually have access to. The Learning Circle Supper Club will explore a range of topics including:

Introduction to meal prep: students will learn how to prep a healthy meal using an “economies of scale” approach to save on time and money which is so important for busy students on a budget with the goal of keeping the per meal budget at $10 or less

Introduction to food skills: knife skills, measurement and basic cooking techniques – for those who really have little to no experience with cooking

Introduction to culturally significant recipes: from across the African Diaspora including soups, stews and preserves

Introduction to food growing and recipe development: link the Urban Farm crops to a recipe, for example, you have an abundance of Jamaican pumpkin, what do you do with it? How about substitutions (modifying based on dietary restrictions), scaling recipes up for efficient use of time, energy, resources and budget.

The program is built with thoughtful intention to connect young people back to the land and inspire students through opportunities such as field trips to suburban and rural community farms such as Lucky Bug Farm in Baden, Ontario and bursaries for apprentices to attend the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario conference.

The School of Nutrition food labs feature state of the art audio-visual technology making it possible for each session to be recorded and/or streamed live (i.e. the Urban Farm’s Instagram) or to be shared across various TMU partner channels or with suburban and rural communities and thereby expanding the reach and accessibility of this program.

Nicole and her team at the Urban Farm understand the work they do cannot necessarily solve the food insecurity crisis faced by too many Black families. However, the Harvest Collective and Learning Circle at the Urban Farm can serve as a conduit to help amplify and strengthen Food Sovereignty engagement and activities on campus and beyond.

2022-Urban-Farm-Impact-Report-2.pdf

Why is this project important to the community?

The resiliency of one community is dependent on the others to prosper and vice versa. In our respective communities, our goals and visions are similar: build community spirit, inspire young people, and grow community resiliency through learning. Black and other racialized and marginalized communities have historically faced systemic inequalities and disenfranchisement, leading to limited access to healthy and culturally appropriate food. Food Sovereignty programs tailored to the specific needs and cultural contexts of Black communities can play a vital role in promoting social justice, health equity, economic empowerment, and sustainable development. The Learning Circle Supper Club aims to enhance community resiliency by inspiring communities to be more self-reliant and not necessarily completely dependent on external food systems that can become surprisingly fragile, unreliable and most importantly unaffordable. This resilience is particularly crucial during times of crisis which is made so startlingly clear when catastrophe strikes, whether it be a pandemic, natural disaster or any other disruption within the global food supply chain. The Learning Circle Supper Club will promote food as a fundamental human right, after all food is a right and in a country as bountiful as Canada hunger has no place for anyone here, and is a matter of poor food governance, unequal distribution and systemic injustices, of which we hope to help mitigate through the rich programming at TMU’s Urban Farm.