News – North Okanagan Land to Table Network

11Dec 2024 by admin No Comments

Recap: Indigenous Food Sovereignty Workshop

Recap: Indigenous Food Sovereignty Workshop In November, Land to Table co-hosted an Indigenous Food Sovereignty workshop on the "From the Ground Up: Toolkit for Indigenous Food Sovereignty Planning" in Revelstoke with the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (WGIFS), the Indigenous Friendship Society of Revelstoke (IFSR) and the Revelstoke Local Food Initiative. The toolkit is a comprehensive guide developed by WGIFS, who brought three staff to facilitate the three-day workshop. The event gathered Indigenous food champions for facilitated discussions and activities and built shared understanding within a network of organizations and people leading Indigenous food projects. Participants included staff from Interior Health, School District 22, The Lower Samilkameen’s Ntamtqen Community Garden & Food Hub, Xeni Gwet'in Climate Readiness Initiative, Colville Tribes Language Program, Indigenous Rise Up Wellness, the Cwelcwelt Kuc…

09Dec 2024 by admin No Comments

Jan 30 & Feb 20, 2025 | Wholesale Ready Workshop Series

Events, News, Upcoming Event

Wholesale-Ready Workshop Series Dates: (Participants must be able to attend both sessions)+ Session 1: Thursday, January 30th 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.+ Session 2: Thursday, February 20th 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Location: Community Futures North Okanagan in Vernon Register Now Wholesale opportunities for local vegetables and fruit, to a variety of markets are opening up in our region, including to schools and social service agencies (like food banks). The Wholesale-Ready Workshop Series is geared toward small and medium sized farmers in the North Okanagan and surrounding regions to network and share knowledge of how to grow for and sell to wholesale markets (e.g. distributors, institutions, processors, restaurants, caterers, schools etc.). This series will allow existing farmers to learn about opportunities to expand their businesses (operations and reach), and for new…

02Dec 2024 by admin

Community Conversations: Vernon Seniors Share Ideas to Improve Food Security

Event Recap, News

On October 30, 2024, NexusBC Community Resource Centre and Land to Table Network Society hosted a lunch session at the Schubert Centre with 22 local seniors to discuss food security. The purpose of the event was for seniors to share their experiences, perspectives, and feedback to help both hosting organizations to advocate for, plan, and deliver programming that supports seniors’ food security. During registration for the event, of the 36 people who registered, only 30% of seniors indicated that they were familiar with the term “food security,” and when asked why they attended the event, nearly half of the participants stated it was because they wanted to learn and share ideas about food security. The session provided both an overview of what food security is and how Land to Table…

17Oct 2024 by admin

Community Food Security – An Election Highlight and Hopes for Shuswap MLA!

Support for Okanagan Tree Fruit Growers

Equitable Access, Nutritious Choices: Dietitians’ Guide to Food Bank Purchasing

Featured News, L2T Updates, News

Equitable Access, Nutritious Choices: Dietitians' Guide to Food Bank Purchasing We extend our gratitude to Seamus Damstrom and Linda Boyd, Public Health Dietitians with Interior Health's Healthy Eating and Food Security Program, whose expertise enriches this discussion. - During our Rural Food Banks Study project, it became apparent that food banks and food security organizations are having to purchase more food than ever before to keep up with program demands. Typically, food banks rely on food donations as the bulk of the food they distribute. As purchasing budgets increase and food organizations are forced to make food procurement decisions regularly, food banks and programs are finding themselves in a position of choosing what food is offered to their food insecure clients. Since most of these programs have historically relied on donated…

26Apr 2024 by admin

Rural Food Banks Study

Featured News, L2T Updates, News

Rural Food Banks Study Over the last year, Land to Table (L2T) with Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Institute for Sustainable Food Systems (ISFS) conducted a Rural Food Banks Study in collaboration with Community Connections (Revelstoke) Society, and 4 rural food banks, to help understand and co-develop solutions to the unique challenge of feeding people in rural communities in British Columbia, in the face of increasing demand for food bank services. As the demand for emergency food services increases country-wide, during a time when public and private monetary and food donations have been at an all time low, these rural food banks decided that working together was the best way to address shared challenges including:over-stretched budgets and staff coupled with ever changing circumstances amid ever increasing demand. Funded by a generous, anonymous…

26Apr 2024 by admin

Spring Reflections from a Local Farmer

2023 Reflections

Featured News, L2T Updates, News

Another year has come and gone, and the learning and growing we experience at Land to Table persistently keep us on our toes. We remain genuinely grateful, interested, and engaged in local food systems work. In last year's reflection blog post, I used the phrase 'settling in' to describe Land to Table in 2022. During that year, we further clarified our role as a network through capacity building and fostering connections across many different organizations and sectors. We worked to ensure that more of the food grown here reaches the people who live here. We have always emphasized that without local farmers and their ability to grow farm businesses, our food security is limited. For that reason we will continue to draw links between the local food economy and community…

04Dec 2023 by admin

Feel-Good Stories from 2023

Featured News, L2T Updates, News

Perhaps you’ve heard (cause we’ve shared a few times now)… New this year, Land to Table has been collecting an inventory of the fresh food needs of local social service agencies and food banks across the North Okanagan. This work is a result of the “value chain development” we have been doing in conjunction with UBCO - to connect organizations who care about using purchasing dollars toward ethical/sustainable food, to the farmers who produce said food! Through strong leadership values, advocating for more local food and clear food purchasing goals at Turning Points in Vernon, we were able to connect a local farmer to Turning Points Food Service Manager. Read to hear the farmers experience of that connection: As soon as we completed our first delivery to Turning Point in…

Category: News