SOLEfood wins $15,000 Towards an Organic Community Garden

With a mission to increase organic acreage nationwide and provide every Canadian with access to high quality, healthy, and organic food, Nature’s Path Organic Foods is proud to announce that SOLEfood is the winner of the 2010 Gardens For Good organic garden grant contest. The Vancouver-based urban farm will receive $10,000 cash for their community garden project in addition to $5,000 in technical design and production mentorship from Organic Gardening magazine and the team at Nature’s Path.

“We are honoured and thrilled to be working with sustainable business pioneer Nature’s Path,” states Seann Dory, Sustainability Manager for United We Can. “Nature’s Path’s support will help SOLEfood create an urban farm that helps create a more food sovereign inner city and will give DTES residents the opportunity to transform a piece of their community.”

The Gardens for Good program was born from the success of Nature’s Path’s previous community garden initiatives and most notably their 2009 Compassion Into Action organic breakfast and food bank fundraiser, which raised over $250,000 in cash and food for the Greater Vancouver and Richmond Food Banks. Looking to encourage other communities to provide accessible, healthy, organic foods, both programs have been extended into two deserving American cities in 2010 –Vallejo, CA and Tallahassee, FL.

Nature’s Path and Organic Gardening were so impressed by the quality of the  grant applications that they also decided to award consolation prizes to further advance organic garden projects in North Vancouver, BC; Port Coquitlam, BC; Nashville, TN; St. Louis MI; and Whitefish, MT.

 “Our goal is to plant it forward”, notes Arran Stephens, founder and CEO of Nature’s Path. “By providing access to healthy, organic food and the education needed to grow it, we hope to encourage and cultivate socially responsible community leaders who will bring people together to feed those in need.”

Everyone in the Greater Vancouver Area is invited to bring a food donation to the Vancouver Public Library from 9am-12pm on October 2nd and enjoy a complementary organic breakfast during Nature’s Path’s second-annual Compassion Into Action event. This year’s goal is to raise $1,000,000 to help put food on empty tables.

SOLEFood is an Enterprising Non Profit (ENP) established in 2009 by United We Can. It is an urban farm that provides training and employment opportunities to residents from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. Their locally grown food is sold to restaurants, at Farmers Markets and community organizations with similar aims of improving neighbourhood food security. Employees see the farm as a place for self-growth and healthy community development, while beautifying their neighbourhood.  SOLEfood hopes their future will grow to include a network of farms that help revitalize the neighbourhood, provide meaningful employment, and build healthy relationships around healthy food.