IMPACT! EARTH, CLIMATE AND FOOD GROWING: OUR FOOD AMBASSADORS' JOURNEY SO FAR

“Recognising that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come... Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed, to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder.”

— Wangari Maathai

It is easy to feel lost and overwhelmed when we think about something as big and scary as the Climate Emergency.

For years, companies and countries like the UK, but also habits and lifestyles, have harmed people and the planet’s biodiversity. And now our Earth is heating up, harming communities around the world, harming other species and damaging that part of ourselves that wants to feel connected with something bigger and still believe that we can be extraordinary if we want to.

What should I do as youth worker, as mother, as friend? What are the right questions and the actions I should take? Some answers to these questions are clearer and have been heard now for decades, some other answers still have to be defined, others struggles to find a place in the news. Other do not exist yet.

How can we hold the reality, the facts, the future predictions and at the same time the hope, the positive thinking and the energy that’s necessary to make a change and, before that, to believe we can?

There are moments, fractions of a second in which I feel there is fertile soil for that thinking and hope. Something like the feeling I have when I imagine I was stardust, in the tiny speck floating in the darkness at the beginning of the universe; something like the nice shivering on my skin when I walk barefooted on the sand for the first time after a long winter; children rolling down the grassy hills, you know? The warmth of my mother’s towel wrapped around me after a swim in the sea; that feeling that gives you power to believe something good can happen.

When the yellow gate of the story garden opens and I see the face of the first young person joining the session, that moment is when I come back from the lost lands of news, statistics and reports about our living planet, our city and our relationship with nature.

Children and young people. Their thinking, their own existence is that place of hope where you can find solutions. They put a light in my heart.

Thanks to funding from Islington Council and The National Lottery's Climate Action Fund, last December we started a new journey around Climate, Food waste and food growing with a group of local young people approaching the topic in different and connected ways. In the overall frame of climate and food growing, we have started to realise how understanding food growing and growing food is really the radical act and the only true revolution that can overturn things. By working with soil, plants and nature, an essential thing can happen: we are changing ourselves.

We met those young people for the first time at the Story Garden around the fire, cooking and gardening and reflecting on what it means to be a young person on the planet. Then we moved online during the first months of 2021, as my wonderful colleague Kathryn describes, establishing a corporate foundation of knowledge in relevance to the climate emergency, to frame the project into perspective. We did this by breaking down terms like, 'climate change', 'pollution', 'food waste', 'compost', 'harvesting'

We invited young people to photograph the beauty of nature and met stories of other young people who are advocates of Nature.

What is the journey of a banana, the most popular fruit we eat despite throwing away millions of them every year? Why is soil not just dirt? How can we help other creatures in finding a future through our shopping?

We also gardened and cooked online delivering kits to the young people’s homes.

“I'm finding this project to be a really evocative and profound experience, that is teaching me a lot. I would have to say I haven't done a lot about how to dig in myself and think deeper about not just the climate but the world as a whole. I am entirely excited to continue this journey and learn more and gain a greater understanding about the world around me. Thank you Global Generation” Ashton

Now, the spring has welcomed us back to the garden again and we have finally started with more practical work, taking the Story Garden as a hub to create a more sustainable borough and hopefully a place to start a food movement that, together with other wonderful local initiatives and community groups, could turn Islington into an Urban Farm in the future.

Wood, screws, hammers, drills and spades. From the globe situation, we zoomed into the nutrients in soil, centimetres, staplers, grains of saw dust and seeds.

One evening, we got inspired by one of the building tool we were using to make a planter: an impact driver (a drill). With enthusiasm and satisfaction, Young Ambassador Zara accomplished the task of completing a planter by using an impact driver and looking at the orange sky she shouted “IMPACT!”

I think that was the best way to express the outcome of the session and in general the value that is guiding us. Let’s make an impact. With humility and appreciation (said Nathan), with teamwork and endurance (said Ziyad)

Every session feels like a start. Like an action researcher, I feel myself restarting again and again, embracing facts, feelings, things like never before.

Spring has only started and the journey is at its beginning. Media sessions, trips, theatre workshops, a camping residential will give even more dynamic to the journey.

Ultimately we are hoping to connect more with different cultures and heritages about food growing and to contribute in some way to COP26.

“The Earth is depleting and it is an inconvenient fact, everything is interconnected but knowing what we've been doing to it makes it inconvenient because then we would have to do something about it. We need to cultivate our home, learn how it works and how to sustain ourselves through it, harmoniously. There is hope in the knowledge that the earth is definitely worth fighting for, not just for our generation but the next and the next and the next generation after that.”

- Abena

(Pictures of flyer, pictures of fire, planters, drills, some of our power points, brownies, values cards)

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Notes from the Garden