New Zealand: Otakaro Orchard – Community Garden and Food Hub
To date, the project has raised over $1.1M in capital from 8 organizations and 550 Cantabrians, $400K in-kind from 50 local & national businesses, and over 2367 hours contributed by 612 volunteers.
Excerpt from their website:
Otakaro Orchard will serve as the welcoming front door to the local food resilience movement which has been gaining momentum since the earthquakes shook our city apart.’
In that time, we realised that supermarkets carry only 3 days’ worth of food and if our supply chains get disrupted, we go hungry. Community gardens became important places of refuge and connection as well as sources of fresh food.
In the past few years, the Food Resilience Network (aka Edible Canterbury) has been holding a collective vision of Christchurch as an ‘Edible Garden City’. A city where every citizen has access to the fresh and healthy food they need to live well. Given that most cities produce less than 1% of their own food, re-imagining our urban green spaces as edible ones is a key way we can start to change this.
Co-created through community consultation, almost 200 people from over 30 groups and organisations worked together to craft the proposal to CERA to develop this site.
In the past few years since this proposal was approved, we’ve built an amazing team to bring this project to fruition. Landscape and building architects, engineers, permaculturists, composting toilet fanatics, project managers, construction companies and community activists all coming together to progress this vision. We hope that by establishing Otakaro Orchard, it will be proof that these kinds of spaces can work, that many more will become possible in the city.
