October 16, 2019

Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG) Conference Coming To Jersey City

October 16, 2019/ Sustainable JC

NESAWG Conference Coming To Jersey City - Nov 7 -9th !

Submitted by Tamia McCormick SJC Board Member

The Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG) is the Region's Food and Farm Network and they are bringing their 26th Annual Conference to Jersey City! Their theme this year is ‘It Takes a Region’ and it will be a great experience for those seeking to network with food justice leaders from throughout this area as well as learn how to build a more sustainable food system within their neighborhood.

The event will take place Thu, Nov 7, 2019, 12:00 PM –Sat, Nov 9, 2019, 3:00 PM, downtown JC at New Jersey City University Business School, 200 Hudson St, Jersey City, NJ 07311.

Why should you come? NESAWG will be hosting numerous workshops that will provide you with the technical skills you need to make a positive change here in Jersey City. Workshops include:

Seed & Swap: saving/exchanging seeds and stories from throughout the region

Value Chain Mapping for the Food and Value Chain Sector: Map your own food chain

Newark Urban Food System Tour: Explore Newark’s urban gardens and farms

Agriculture Policy & Climate Change: how to coordinate strategies to move along climate change work in the agriculture and food systems sector

Anti-Oppression Training: Day-long training teaching concepts and practices to confront and prevent oppression

Furthermore, NESAWG is an organization that is committed to inclusion. They provided scholarships for underserved communities i.e. people of color, youth, LGBTQ, etc. to ensure all who would like to attend will be able to do so. In addition, they are also providing child care for parents that are interested in the program, but may not have a babysitter.

This year, NESAWG is instituting an optional tiered pricing structure. They are doing this so they can continue to offer lower cost tickets to those who need it, while raising funds to support those lower cost tickets and their scholarship fund.

Special Pricing Offer Ends Oct 25th - Additional Discounts Available Thereafter, Details Here.

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN! To purchase tickets, please click the following link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nesawgs-26th-annual-it-takes-a-region-conference-tickets-64833139666

For further information, please reach out to NESAWG Executive Director, Tracy Lerman @ 845.501.0191, x 1 | tracy@nesawg.org | www.nesawg.org.

October 12, 2014

A Sustainable Network of Community Gardens in Jersey City

October 12, 2014/ Alina S. Tarmu

Sustainable JC is launching a new project, under the generous and collaborative umbrella of the Good Food Now! initiative, involving Jersey City's community gardens. A first step encourages existing community garden stewards to create a free account on Farming Concrete and use their BARN tool for logging garden data. Most of the city's community gardens are already listed - check it out. The use of the tool was made possible through Sustainable JC's relationship with Farming Concrete, developers of the tool, which is being deployed primarily in New York, through the Design Trust's Five Boro Farms project. Sustainable JC is initiating the use of this tool in New Jersey through the Jersey City pilot.

This is what the current distribution of community gardens look like, after listing them on Farming Concrete - not bad but we need more of them !

Why is it important to monitor and keep accurate track of community garden parameters? Just like in any successful enterprise, measurable indicators make it much easier to manage and improve the gardens' efficiency and impact, increasing their benefits to the community. We all know that there are not nearly enough community gardens in Jersey City, helping to address affordable community access to fresh and healty food for all ("food security"). Thus, it becomes increasingly important to sustainably MAXIMIZE the benefits of the existing ones.

A more detailed explanation of why community garden data collection is important can be found here and by watching the following video:

[embed]https://vimeo.com/69500654[/embed]

One of the goals of SJC's Good Food Now! inititiative is to connect a comprehensive community garden network for Jersey City, initiate exchanges (know-how, seeds, success stories etc.) and hopefully make available a "quantitative platform" compelling enough to attract funding to support a city-wide community garden / sustainable landscape design improvement project. The team working on this aims to provide technical assistance to gardeners to help maximize productivity and sustainability of garden sites, while mitigating and reducing urban contamination. A website for this aspect of the project is currently under construction.

To participate in this project, please follow these steps:

STEP ONE: Use the form provided below to contact the project coordinator with the name and location of your community garden, to make sure your garden is listed. A rough estimation of the area surface of the garden would be greatly appreciated, along with a description of the physical limits of the garden.
STEP TWO: Go to farmingconcrete.org and register for a user account. Do not worry about the Five Borough reference, Jersey City has its own community garden circle already setup inside the tool.

If you have any questions about this project or the online tool, please feel free to contact the project leader using the form provided below.

[contact-form to='alina.tarmu@yahoo.com' subject='Farming Concret'][contact-field label='Name' type='name' required='1'/][contact-field label='Email' type='email' required='1'/][contact-field label='Website' type='url'/][contact-field label='Comment' type='textarea' required='1'/][/contact-form]

Lastly,

Sustainable community gardens can integrate no / low cost solutions like rainwater collection for irrigation and composting for enriching and treating the soil. This project is connected to two other SJC Projects: 1) Green Infrastructure / Rain Gardens +ART Campaign / Rain Barrels and 2) Community Composting. We are avid supporters of Bokashi, a fermentation approach to food waste recycling, which provides multiple benefits for urban landscapes and which can be a stand alone approach or be integrated into traditional backyard and community garden composting systems