Foodie Finder

The CSA Project is a collaborative venture to address the issues of community capacity building and short/long term sustainability, built on the foundation of locally grown foods. The project provides partners and stakeholders with an opportunity to discover and build upon existing networks - creating abundance in wealth, health and knowledge.

The CSA Project is a conduit to educating, building, connecting and sustaining short and long term relationships with local growers and a ready-made market. It employs the trade concepts of added-value by introducing community currency that aids in economic development within trading groups.

The CSA project also provides the following benefits:

1. Revenue expansion for producers and their trading networks.
2. Identifies and sources ideal customers.
3. Educates customers on benefits of local foods.
4. Provides incentives for short term and long term relationships with customers and suppliers.
5. Builds wealth within communities and trading partners.
6. Paves the way for expansion for other sustainable systems to be developed at the community level.

Our small abattoirs are disappearing at an alarming rate. We only have a few left in Waterloo Region. Without this vital part of small farm infrastructure, we face the real possibility of losing the ability to buy quality grass fed meat from small farms. See the Sustain Ontario website for more information on this issue and what is currently being done. http://sustainontario.com/initiatives/meatprocessing

STEERING COMMITTEE MANDATE

This is the mandate as we see it and as is informed by the Transition movement that started in the UK, and now exists around the world:
- raise awareness about peak oil and climate change
- define a boundary for our community
- get people together
- facilitate the creation of goals and principles
- facilitate the beginning action
- connect with existing organizations, businesses, schools, groups
- disband once the ball is rolling, allowing for new leaders

Public institutions such as municipal governments, school boards, and hospitals have a large and stable demand for food. Such purchasing power and stability is important and can act as an anchor for the local food economy. Further, public institutions, use public funds to purchase foods. These dollars should be spent responsibly. One way to acheive this is to procure locally grown and raised food, which supports local economies and community health, as well as the environment at large.

According to a recent Canadian Coalition of Green Health Care survey conducted jointly with My Sustainable Canada and funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, several Ontario health care facilities are purchasing local food, but none have undertaken extensive food service audits. These audits could provide baseline information on the quantity of Ontario food that is currently served in the health care sector. Food origin audits could also enhance the capacity for Ontario food to enter the health care supply chain by identifying all foods that are sourced from outside Ontario, but are available locally; furthermore, there are no known systems in place to monitor local food purchasing among health care facilities and group purchasing organizations in Ontario.

This project will conduct food origin audits at one health care facility and its Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) by: documenting the origin of foods purchased by this facility; identifying opportunities for it to purchase Ontario food; and, outline which food products have a reasonable ready supply for this organization to start/increase its purchase of Ontario foods.