I was recently contacted by Benita Matofska who wanted to tell me about The People who Share and Global Sharing Week 2019. The aims of The People Who Share are to enable a fairer, caring economy built around the sharing of human and physical resources. Citizenship, inclusivity and sharing are at the heart of their mission. They do a lot of work to promote these values and connect people all over the world. They have recently published a stunning book called Generation Share which is full of case-studies of people around the world sharing goods or skills, opportunities, power, responsibilities and knowledge. So many of these values fit in with the work of Norwich Farmshare.
We are here to grow food for the local community. While we must operate as a business so we can pay our growers and admin team and invest in the farm to make it more efficient and successful we also do a lot of other things. We share skills and knowledge with our community about how to grow food. We give people the confidence to grow food for themselves. We empower people to look at the food system in a different way and take more responsibility for their food consumption. We create networks of like minded people who feel part of something more meaningful and feel better able to change the world they live in. By creating a model of farming which works financially and biologically we ensure access to land to continue farming which means we can share that access to land, connection to soil and to nature and crops with more people.
I attended the launch of the Generation Share book and met lots of other people doing great things around Norwich to share their skills, knowledge and resources. We did some fun blind taste tasting which to be honest didn’t produce quite the results we would have liked. While some tasters preferred our veg to the supermarket veg by far other samples produced ambivalent results. In some cases the participants preferred the supermarket veg. While there are lots of factors involved with choosing where to buy your food, taste is obviously very important and these kind of events are great feedback for prompting us to think about our choices of crop variety and growing techniques. We still believe there is nowhere else in Norwich where you can buy food that is so fresh and has so little packaging and is grown so close to where it is sold. But we are open to all feedback as we want to be growing the best food we can.
Please find out more about The People who Share and Generation Share. Many of us are saddened and frustrated by the economic, social and environmental problems that exist in the world but there are lots of solutions out there. In many cases all we need to do is educate ourselves and take some action, even if its baby steps.
Meanwhile, we’ll continue sharing the mission of Norwich Farmshare by growing the best food we can for the community of Norwich.
Have a great week.
Joel
