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Acquiring Knowledge
Another area of sustainability that we’ve delved into is education. First, we sought knowledge in the realm of sustainability. We attended the Slow Food Nation Conference in San Francisco this past September and truly had our eyes opened. We toured Marin county and learned first hand about MALT (Marin Agricultural Land Trust). We talked with growers and producers from across the country and had the sense of a tide turning. Most importantly we saw the potential of the internet to create larger communities from smaller ones. We also saw what the power of a like-minded group means for change. For in the end, you can’t have meaningful change without critical mass.
Vancouver Food Policy Coalition
We’re involved with the Vancouver Food Policy Coalition as both food sponsor and attendee to meetings. The coalition’s mandate is to ‘support the development of a just and sustainable food system for the City of Vancouver. A just and sustainable food system is defined as one in which food production, processing, distribution and consumption are integrated to enhance the environmental, economic, social and nutritional health of a particular place’.
Awareness
In the beginning we saw ourselves moving into uncharted territory and we wanted to document and compile our knowledge and offer it up as a resource. To do this, we devoted a section of our website to sustainability awareness locally.
Giving Back
There are a number of causes that we’re involved in, and we’ll highlight a few;
Farm Folk/CityFolk’s annual ‘Feast of Fields’
Slow Food International
Fruit Tree Project
United Way
SPCA and SAINTS (Senior Animals in Need Today Society)
Summary
One clear benefit of being a relatively small company is that we can draft policy concerning sustainability and effect change quickly. We have a bottom up mentality that encourages input from all of our staff. We’re continually setting ourselves new projects and achievable goals. A recent example of this would be our dilemma with bottled water. On one hand selling bottled water has a positive effect on the bottom line, but our landfills are full of plastic bottles and we live in a city with tap water that is the envy of the entire world! We’ve committed to phasing out bottled water and replacing it with filtered tap water in glass carafes.
We really do see sustainability as a never ending journey complete with wrong turns and successful summit attempts, but one thing is clear, the journey once embarked upon can never stop!
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