Sustain / CGA members & supporters meet-up - AUG 2024 with guest Jacqui from Pocket City Farms

This month in our Members & Supporters webinar meet-up, we have a very special guest speaker, Jacqui Besgrove, from Pocket City Farms who will enlighten us on a project her and her team have been tinkering away at in the background for some time now called Farm In A Box.

This webinar will feature an introduction as to what Farm In A Box is all about, and the audience tuning in will have a remarkable opportunity to add your thoughts to the project in it's research phase. Not only will you be assisting to shape the future of PCF's new urban farm site, but also many future green spaces all around the country, with this unique urban regeneration toolkit the team are creating.

Pocket City Farms is a not-for-profit registered charity that operates as a social enterprise. PCF started their first urban farm converting two disused bowling greens in Sydney back in 2016, and have just celebrated their 8th birthday! 

Jacqui says they "have learnt so much on our journey and are now looking to open a new urban farm site. In doing so we want to build out our farm in a box concept, documenting all the learning from the past 8 years from how to secure land, our farmer incubator training program, all our farming tips and tricks, sales and marketing, our education and community programs and all the important but often overlooked stuff, governance models, policies and procedures, work health and safety and human resource management. 

We aim to get this into a user friendly toolkit so other groups right across Australia can fast track their journey to start urban regeneration. We'd love input from others to find out what would be useful to have in the toolkit."

This event is free for members of Sustain and CGA! If you are not a member you can join Sustain here and CGA here. Supporters can join the webinar for $10/$5.

This is the third a series of joint members & supporters meet-ups we'll be organising this year - so help us grow this movement and become a member!  

About Jacqui Besgrove

Jacqui Besgrove is CEO of Pocket City Farms and has spent over 20 years working on international development, permaculture, sustainability, community development and social enterprise projects including work supporting former refugees with Green Connect. She is an experienced permaculture practitioner and educator who is passionate about designing and implementing local urban food solutions, building community resilience and promoting simple living. When she isn't at Pocket City Farms Jacqui is the convenor of Restorative Ecologies: Permaculture Principles and Practice as part of the UNSW Masters of Environmental Management program.

Meet your hosts - Naomi Lacey, President, Community Gardens Australia 

& Nick Rose, Executive Director, Sustain: The Australian Food Network...

Naomi Lacey, President, Community Gardens Australia

Naomi is a permaculturalist who is passionate about promoting healthy food systems, sustainable lifestyles and cultivating community. She helped to establish the first community garden in the satellite city of Palmerston in Darwin and is currently the President of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network.

Naomi believes that community gardens provide valuable spaces in which to cultivate sustainable lifestyles and healthy food systems in our cities. They are also a wonderful way of bringing people together to share, learn, grow and enjoy the many benefits of growing their own food.

Nick Rose, Executive Director, Sustain: The Australian Food Network

Nick has been the Executive Director of Sustain: The Australian Food Network since its establishment in January 2016. With a background In law and community development, Nick brings more than a decade of working at the grassroots and institutional level in several Australian states in food sovereignty and sustainable food systems. He is the editor of "Fair Food: Stories From a Movement Changing The World (2015)" and the co-editor of "Reclaiming The Urban Commons: The Past, Present and Future of Food Growing in Australian Towns And Cities (2018)." Nick is also a lecturer in food systems, food policy and governance and food movements for William Angliss Institute in their Bachelor of Food Studies and Master of Food Systems and Gastronomy.

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SPECIAL NOTICE

Sustain is currently running a crowd-funding campaign to support the recovery of food production capacity in the Gaza strip, which has, (and continues to be), devastated by the ongoing genocidal violence being waged against the people of Gaza by Israel. We have been asked to run this campaign by the leadership of the Gaza Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Platform, with whom we worked to raise $25,000 to support members of the Gazan Urban Women Agripreneurs Forum in 2021 after the May 2021 Israeli bombing campaign. 

For more info, plus contribute to our efforts to help the small-scale women producers of Gaza recover and rebuild their enterprises, to work towards food sovereignty in Gaza, please visit the campaign page on our website.