Date: January 7th, 2021
Time: 7 pm
Where: Online
Over the coming months the Society for Organic Urban Land Care will be hosting an online discussion and learning series on the role of land care, horticulture, and landscaping in cultivating social and land equity.
The field of horticulture directly or indirectly influences almost all urban greenspaces. This influence can be put to work in developing solutions to a variety of issues:
- Over half of the Indigenous people within Canada live in urban communities and most have little or no access to land and greenspaces.
- Food insecurity is rampant within Canada and particularly affects racialized communities, the majority of whom do not have access to land to grow food for themselves, or to grow and sell food within the community.
- The broad displacement of native plant species has widely recognized ecological impacts, especially for pollinator populations. Their displacement also has cultural implications for the Indigenous Peoples who have lived in relationship with those species for millennia.
- The resources consumed in our projects are sourced somewhere. Learning about their sourcing and lifecycles can allow us to influence landscapes beyond the boundaries of our project sites.
This series is open to the entire horticultural community. There will be additional sessions at the end of the series for SOUL members to discuss the role of SOUL in relation to these issues and any actions or policies to adopt as we go forward.
Since the topics that will be explored are broad and complex, they can take time to process and integrate. With this in mind, the series will take place over several months, in paired sessions. Each pair will include a learning session with a guest speaker and/or a specific topic, followed a week or two later by a roundtable discussion session (or sessions, if attendance levels are high enough) for participants to share questions, thoughts and ideas on that topic.
At this point, we plan to host six pairs of sessions over six months.
Video recordings of past presentations are available. Please register to receive information and links to future presentations.
October 8th: Working from where we are
An overview of some of the ways that horticulture, landscaping and land care intersect with and can support social justice and equity effortsNovember 5th : Urban green space and land access for Indigenous and racialized peoples and across socioeconomic spectrums. Presented by Isaac Crosby, Lead Hand in urban agriculture at the Evergreen Brick Works
January 7th – Food Access and Sovereignty in the Urban Landscape: Presented by Cheyenne Sundance of Sundance Harvest
February: Cultural values and how they frame horticultural norms
March: Cultivating awareness within the land care and horticultural industry
April: Cultivating relationships within diverse communities
Participation in this series is free for SOUL members (annual public membership is $50) and pay-what-you-can for non-members, with a suggested contribution of $10 per session pair if your budget permits.
To receive email updates on this series, please click here.
Please help us spread the word about this series by sharing it with your contacts and horticultural network.