September 23, 2014

Durham District School Board Celebrates a Commitment to Local Food at the Cafeteria Connects Farmers’ Market!

For our Local Food Challenge in August, the assignment was to use a local ingredient that you’ve never used before. Mark Kenny from the University of Guelph wrote to us and shared this spectacular menu using not one, but five very interesting products. Here’s what Mark had to say about their submission for the August Challenge:

You're invited to take part in the Greenbelt Fund's Local Food Symposium on February 3 and 4, 2015.

Are you a farmer who's submitted an agricultural application to your municipality?  What kind of experience did you have?  As farm operations change and evolve within the Golden Horseshoe, growth is often necessary for the operation to expand or redevelop.This workshop will showcase the best practices and processes of selected municipalities as well as the experience of farmers in order to enable municipal staff and conservation authorities to implement more effective approaches to handling Agricultural applications.

Thank you for taking this survey and providing us with feedback on these exciting new opportunities for Ontariofresh.ca! To view the full summary of the Ontariofresh.ca v2.0 consultations, click here.

The Greenbelt Fund recently employed the consulting firm Millier Dickinson Blais (MDB) to engage its key stakeholders as it considered the possible expansion, development, and improvement of the Ontariofresh.ca website as well as potential directions and opportunities in the context of these consultations. The following is a summary of the feedback received from 160 stakeholder participants and the potential strategic directions that emerged through the process. To provide us with feedback on these potential strategic opportunities, take our survey!

The Regional Food Grant Program (Broader Public Sector Grant Stream) has awarded over $5 million in grants to fund local food projects across the broader public sector (BPS) value chain. The Education and Outreach Program facilitates the sharing of best practices, provides training and resources, assists in tracking and reporting local food purchasing, and aids in promoting Ontario foods in BPS/OPS institutions. The Education and Outreach strategic plan includes an assessment of 100 BPS foodservice operations and their ability to track and promote Ontario foods.

University Health Network (UHN) is moving full steam ahead with their latest project supported by the Greenbelt Fund. They've started using crowdsourcing to identify creative solutions to help them overcome the main challenges in providing local Ontario food to UHN patients.

According to Simon French of Cookstown Greens, there’s a real opportunity to change people’s lives through food.

Story by Chloe Brown, Ontariofresh​.ca Program Coordinator

“We’re not a value chain, we’re partners. We share the bounty.” – Bryan Gilvesy, Y U Ranch