About Sustain Ontario

Sustain Ontario is a province-wide, cross-sectoral alliance that promotes healthy food and farming. Sustain Ontario takes a collaborative approach to research, policy development and action by addressing the intersecting issues related to healthy food and local sustainable agriculture. Sustain Ontario is working towards a food system that is healthy, ecological, equitable and financially viable.

Sustain Ontario’s history

Sustain Ontario is the outcome of a two year process led by the Metcalf Foundation that brought together diverse groups and organizations working on food and agriculture issues in Southern Ontario. These groups and organizations represented health, community, farming, and environment sectors. The Metcalf Foundation wanted to explore the appetite for cooperative, integrated work with the goal of transforming food and agriculture at a system-wide level. Through the process facilitated by the Metcalf Foundation, participants identified a need for collaborative policy and advocacy work at the provincial level. Food Connects Us All was published, exploring opportunities for collaborative, cross-sectoral work related to food and agriculture. The result was a proposal to the Metcalf Foundation requesting support for a provincial alliance that would research and develop policy proposals related to healthy food and local sustainable farming. In January 2009, Sustain Ontario hired its first director. Sustain Ontario is currently working to expand its member base and develop research, policy and action priorities. The Metcalf Foundation continues to advise Sustain Ontario as the alliance takes root.

Why Now?

There was once a time everyone thought the world was flat. Figuring out that it was round changed how we saw everything. Now the next revolution in perspective has taken hold-the world is not just round, it is connected. The Global Village-Marshall McLuhan’s phrase for the connected world created by new communications technologies-has arrived, and not just in communications but also with food and foodways. We think this global food village must be connected by conscience and fairness-to the other villagers, and to our environment.

The way we grow, market, process, manufacture, and distribute our food here in Ontario reveals connections across the global village. Ontario’s working landscapes, farms, rural communities, and cities are linked in a web of complex exchanges. But our food policies to date have usually ignored that web, dividing rather than connecting. If we are going to build a healthy and sustainable village, we have to make the connections.

Food is connected to every major problem we face as a society – declining farm incomes, the paving-over of farmland, wildlife protection, rising medical costs, poverty and hunger, urban sprawl, youth unemployment, and communities at risk.

These problems will only be solved when we connect the dots.

Local farmers’ markets, community and school gardens, food co-ops, urban gardens, farmer training programs, Alternative Land Use Services, new certification regimes – all of these emerging possibilities support healthier, tastier food for all villagers. As this happens, everyone benefits and communities become stronger and more inclusive.

Provincial politics have become increasingly stuck in a frustrating gridlock. We have separate ministries for agriculture, health, economic development, community development, and the environment, as well as a multiplicity of non-governmental organizations, each focused on a single piece of the problem. We are at risk of missing many of the potential connections and the benefits they could generate.

Share your ideas by joining the conversation at Sustain Ontario. Ideas that will connect everyone’s talents, abilities and resources. Ideas that are financially viable, ecologically responsible, and socially equitable. Engage with these issues, and let’s work together to find long-lasting solutions to our food policies.

- This is adapted from John Knechtel’s An open letter to the citizens of Ontario, big city, small town, rural, and in-between. Alphabet City, 2007. http://alphabet-city.org/open_letter