Blog post by Brendan Johnson, Executive Director of the Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition, Member of the Poverty Task Force, and Member of The Seed Community Food Hub Committee.
This week friends and members of the Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition and The Seed took a road trip. We wanted to see a Community Food Centre in action so we made our way to Stratford and to The Local. When you pull into the parking lot it is obvious the building was a feed store or some other kind of rural shop. Nothing too special on first impression. But when you walk in the door the first thing you see is a big dining room and a beautiful open kitchen. The space welcomes you and then the people do. Everyone at The Local greets you warmly and strikes up a conversation. The truth is that you don’t know who is a staff member, who is a volunteer or who is a program participant and that is the point. This is not a place of charity. There are no forms to fill out or closed doors. This is a place of acceptance, inclusion and empowerment. Everyone is welcome and everyone belongs.
Steve Stacey, the kind and generous leader of The Local, was our host and gave us a full tour of the space and answered every one of our questions (and there were a lot!) with candor and enthusiasm. The wonderful thing spending the afternoon with Steve was to see how connected he is to his community. He knew every single person’s name that walked in and they all knew him. He handed out many smiles, handshakes and hugs while we were there.
The Local is amazing! They have created so many great programs and so much beauty. They have a distribution hub where they provide food for other food providers in the area. The mandate is to provide as much local and fresh food as possible. They have adult, kid and senior programming. They have an advocacy office built into the space and it is embedded into all of the work that they do (when we arrived they had a representative from Elections Canada speaking about voting). They have a greenhouse where they were starting seedlings the day we were there. I cannot do justice to all of the work they are doing in this short space. You have to see it to take it all in!
We planned our visit to coincide with one of their weekly community meals. Over 100 people came for the meal. It was made from scratch, from fresh ingredients and was delicious. One of the amazing things is that everyone is served at their table like they would be at a restaurant. The joy and good humour in the room was palpable. One of the dinner guests got up with his guitar and serenaded us with some beautiful songs. It was a true community meal and celebration.
What we all walked away thinking was ‘why don’t we have more of this in Guelph?’ and even more importantly ‘WE CAN DO THIS IN OUR CITY!’. Thank you Steve and everyone at The Local. You have inspired us to work even harder at getting The Seed up and running ASAP. We can’t wait to share a meal with you at The Seed!