Refarmers: Grandmother’s Kitchen Garden Project
I found Refarmers through chance and the pandemic.
It was by chance that we lived on the same street and it was the pandemic that took me on endless walks in my community during which I frequently admired their Free Seed Box and vertical gardens in passing. I decided to reach out to Refarmers’ founder Marie-Pierre Bilodeau for a Zoom call and we spent an afternoon talking about her inspiring dreams and ambitions for the future.
One of the community-based change Refarmers created this year was with their Covid-19 Grandmother’s Kitchen Garden Project in Northern Uganda. Previously the East Africa Permaculture Project, Refarmers had spent 2019 in both Western Kenya and Eastern Uganda working on medium scale food forests for schools and surrounding communities.
Even though Marie-Pierre and her program partner Brandon Bauer couldn’t travel to Africa this year, there is work still to be done for the highly marginalized communities in Uganda. Food shortages and extreme hunger are on the rise due to Covid-19 and the HIV/AIDS crisis has left a lot of orphaned children in the care of their grandmothers.
Through the power of the internet and a dedication to continue their work, along with her local project manager Patrick Paul Kidega based in Northern Uganda, Marie-Pierre obtained funding through donations from family and friends and the Refarmers community on Facebook to help Patrick attain supplies to create 10 m x 3 m kitchen gardens for his community. With Patrick doing the work onsite and Marie-Pierre offering whatever support she could from Vancouver, the Refarmers team created 100 kitchen gardens for the grandmothers who have become the primary caregivers of so many children. Each kitchen garden is created to teach families how to address their food insecurity with simple permaculture skills and each garden provides for 10-20 family members. In total, over 1000 lives have been positively impacted by their work this year.
Marie-Pierre speaks of the importance of empowering these marginalized communities to be more self-reliant. She’s more interested in creating intentional program structures that can make real changes in communities and serve and empower people as opposed to just offering space and tools. After seeing first hand the ways in which not creating lessons that communities can fully get behind or are completely invested in, she’s seen how this can lead to systems falling back to the way they were. Previous traditional international aid and development models create a kind of dependency for the communities they aim to help and Refarmers looks to grow from those mistakes. Refarmers wants to approach creating change with a method of leadership that serves to empower and to teach regenerative farming skills in hopes of creating lasting change in the lives they touch.
Marie-Pierre believes that food can be the tool used to change the world. The quote “if you eat, you’re involved in agriculture” brought forward the concept that everyone on this planet is connected to food and everyone’s life is -- in one way or another -- connected to the life of a farmer. It was this idea that catalysed her mission with Refarmers. Our conversation taught me so much about how permaculture can be used to create community-based change world-wide and she opened my eyes to all the ways in which gardening can be called on to bring people together.
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