Caleb Woolcott

I have been working under the supervision of Professor Erik Chevrier to develop Co-op CultivAction, an emerging urban agriculture cooperative. In this Experiential Learning project, we grow vegetables and offer educational programming at a few locations in Lachine and at Concordia. I’m taking part in this project because I believe that building a strong local food solidarity economy is key to mitigating climate change and reducing socioeconomic inequity. I think that cooperatives like CultivAction can play a vital role in these food systems by building community relationships around food and demonstrating that it is possible to produce food locally, sustainably, and “non-economically exploitative.”

To date, I have identified two key themes in what the project has been teaching me, both of which are closely connected with the course material in my School of Community and Public Affairs undergraduate program.

The first is about business development. I have dreams of developing non-market mechanisms for food distribution, but the current reality is that we need to play within the parameters of Quebec’s business law and market-based food-selling regulations in order to build a stable organization that stands the chance of moving beyond those very structures. The clash between the world we are trying to pre-figure and the legal framework we currently live with has presented problems in the development of our co-op’s legal structure. For example, the law requires that solidarity cooperatives like ours (cooperatives with a combination of worker members, user members, and support members) have no more than a third of the Board of Directors made up of community support members. This is because the voices of people with a direct economic role in the business (workers and users) are wrongly seen by the government as more important than community voices. Our original goal was to have an equal number of worker members and community members on the Board, thus equally sharing decision-making power between key stakeholders. Unfortunately, we had to modify our plans to conform to the limitations of the law.

Through this process of renegotiating our structure, I developed the skills to communicate our goals clearly to the community support members we are collaborating with. We needed to communicate effectively to explain our legal limitations and that, by adjusting our organizational structure, we are not trying to rob the community of a voice in the co-op. Further, we had to communicate about the formal and informal mechanisms we could use to ensure they maintain meaningful decision-making power within the organization, despite only making up a third of the Board. This helped me deepen and apply the skills I have learned in the classroom (particularly in classes related to community economic development and social movements) because it allowed me to assess a group’s needs/goals and negotiate with them to ensure their interests remain a priority. During classes, we spend a lot of time analyzing the stakeholders in particular issues or campaigns, and this has been an opportunity to practice understanding these stakeholder relationships in a more concrete way.

The second key theme of my learning has revolved around community-building through the educational programming I have been delivering (leading workshops and volunteer sessions). Since the start of this project, I have delivered four workshops about microgreens and tomato pruning, and I have been leading volunteer sessions each week. I started by approaching these activities in a very regimented way. I thought the value that came out of the workshops was that people would learn a certain skill related to growing food, and I thought that volunteer sessions were about getting work done in the garden. However, I could not have been more wrong. I have now realized that the real value of these activities is community-building. I had to draw on the principles I learned in classes like Community and Local Activism to understand that it is important to look at our practical grassroots work in the co-op as part of the creation of a larger movement around local food and economic justice. My university program emphasizes the importance of connecting small-scale change to larger social issues. Yet, I have had to put extra effort into ensuring I do this in the experiential learning project. I have gradually changed to put more of an emphasis on, for example, the question of why people want to grow microgreens at the beginning of a microgreens workshop rather than learning the hard skills of food growing. I have also been practicing weaving questions into volunteer sessions about how people want to apply the skills they are practicing to benefit themselves and/or their community, thus contributing to the larger food movement.

This project has, in several different forms, helped me develop and apply the theoretical community-building skills taught in my academic program into a meaningful real-world project.

This article was written by Caleb Woolcott and edited by Juan Espana.