Updates from Sustain Ontario!
Posted: December 18, 2017
Categories: GoodFoodBites / News from Sustain Ontario
Greetings Sustain Ontario community! We have some updates we would like to share with everyone.
Firstly, please join us in thanking our former board members who will be leaving us next year. We truly appreciate your time and commitment over the past few years. You will all be greatly missed!
Janet Horner, the Executive Director of the Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance. Janet was the first chair of the new Sustain Ontario Board of Directors in 2015.
Pat Learmonth is the founder and Director of Farms at Work. Pat has served Sustain Ontario in various ways since its inception and was part of the prior working group leading to its creation.
Jeff McCauley is the Purchasing Manager for Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company Ltd.
We would also like to introduce you to our newest board member Paul Spence. We are looking forward to working with you!
Paul has a diverse background that is very relevant to the work of Sustain Ontario. He grew up on a small family farm in rural Ontario. He attended the University of Guelph to study agriculture but got an eye-opening experience on how disconnected people from urban life are from food and agriculture. He next worked in the food system as an exterminator and serviced food plants and service outlets in the Golden Horseshoe for 5 years. He has held positions as a labour manager of a 30-acre greenhouse, worked on a large industrial hog farm with some 500 hogs and hundreds of piglets and, selling meat at regional farmers markets from his farm and from farmers around him. Paul worked with Farm Start on the idea of creating an incubation farm in Chatham Kent. After a brief stint as a Research assistant at the University of Guelph Ridgetown Campus in Vegetable and Fruit production he moved on to Organic Grain Marketing and eventually his current vocation of selling insurance to rural, farming communities. Here he sees daily the realities of shrinking population in rural communities, a lack of youth, migration of young people to urban cities and fewer and fewer farms because of consolidation. All of these experiences motivate him to seek change in the local food system.
The new chair of Sustain Ontario will be Phil Mount from Just Food Ottawa! He has served on the board since 2016.
Other important updates from Sustain Ontario!
Please check out our 2016 Annual Report to see what we have been working on to help build and strengthen the Ontario food system.
Highlights from 2016!
- We hosted a networking event called Cultivating Our Capacity a day that brought together community leaders and municipal staff from across the province to engage in generating initiatives that will help strengthen local food policy and systems.
- The event lead to the creation of two new networks: Sustainable Food Enterprise Network and the Food Justice Network
- The release of two policy toolkits: Reducing Household Food Waste: A Municipal Regional Toolkit and Opportunities for Growth: An Urban Agriculture Toolkit
- The launch of the Food Initiatives Greenhouse, a resource sharing library of a growing collection of community-vetted food strategies, tools, and tactics.
Also, you can now check out our Governance Policy and By-Laws online.
Finally, help us kick off 2018 strong! Join one or more of our virtual network meetings happening January 2018.
Sustainable Food Enterprise Network – January 4th, 2018 at 10:00 am- 11:30 am
Farming and Farmland Network – January 11th, 2018 at 10:00 am- 11:30 am
Community Growing Network – January 18th, 2018 at 10:00 am- 11:30 am
Municipal Food Policy Network – January 18th, 2018 at 2:00 pm- 3:30 pm
Food Justice Network – January 25th, 2018 at 10:00 am- 11:30 am