Q & A with Harvest Pierce County
Harvest Pierce County has partnered with us at Mother Earth farm in multiple ways, most recently on our Victory Garden starts project. We reached out to Renee Meschi, HPC’s Program Coordinator, for a Q & A with this awesome program.
- What is Harvest Pierce County’s mission?
Harvest Pierce County is the urban agriculture wing of the Pierce Conservation District. With a focus on justice, connection, and equity, Harvest Pierce County’s vision is that our region has a thriving community engaged in a just and healthy food system. This is accomplished through reconnecting communities to each other and their food systems through gardening, gleaning, and educating Pierce County about their food and food systems. Our mission is investing in people to foster and sustain an equitable and healthy community-based food system throughout Pierce County.
- How does your work fit into the task of relieving food insecurity in Pierce County?
Some of our work relieves food insecurity directly – the Gleaning Project, for example, harvests food that would otherwise go to waste from local farms and orchards, bringing it to food banks and hot meal sites. Thinking more upstream,we really want to provide opportunities for people to be directly connected to the food system, because now more than ever, we know that localized food systems are resilient food systems. As we’ve seen during the current Covid-19 crisis, having local food sources helps insulate communities when larger industrial systems are strained. Our goal is for fresh, locally grown, culturally-appropriate produce to become accessible to everyone, and we’ve seen how direct connection to land, soil, and the food and medicine they grow can help communities heal emotionally as well as physically.
“Our goal is for fresh, locally grown, culturally-appropriate produce to become accessible to everyone, and we’ve seen how direct connection to land, soil, and the food and medicine they grow can help communities heal emotionally as well as physically.”
- What are HPC’s main programs?
- The Community Garden Program – over the past decade, we’ve worked with a range of different community leaders, organizations, and property owners to increase Pierce County’s number of community gardens from 8 to 83. Each garden has its own unique history, leadership style, and set of community-created bylaws.
- Farm Foundations – As we work to conserve farmland, it is crucial to support and invest in the next generation of farmers. Farm Foundations is a program designed to give participants a full season farm internship experience without a full-time commitment. Farm Foundations combines classroom learning with hands-on skill building, giving participants an introduction to ecosystem theory and agroecology, soil and plant science, as well as farm planning and management.
- The Gleaning Project – The Gleaning Project harvests from local farms, backyard fruit trees, orchards, and more to makes sure local food that would otherwise go to waste makes it to people in need. Harvest Leaders volunteer to scout their neighborhoods for trees, then we coordinate groups of volunteers to harvest and donate them. Before Harvest Pierce County, the Gleaning Project was an Americorps project at Emergency Food Network! Harvest Pierce County formally adopted the program in 2013, as a Americorps VISTA Harvest Against Hunger initiative. We’ve remained connected to EFN throughout the years by partnering to glean at Mother Earth Farm, as well as caring for and gleaning the EFN/Korean Women’s Association Orchard project in Roy.
- Events & Education – We have various annual events and education series, all celebrating our local foodshed through community learning. Our Edible Gardens series is designed to teach beginners the confidence to take those first steps toward growing their own food.We also have a Fruit Tree Education Program, which teaches fruit tree care from planting to pruning, so that we can get an even greater yield from our County’s fruit trees. We also have all kinds of different workshops on special topics, especially at our Annual Spring Community Garden Summit.
- Cultural Ambassadors Program – Cultural Ambassadors are bilingual, bicultural community leaders who help us make sure our programming is reflective of and responsive to everyone in the County, not just those who are a part of the English-speaking mainstream. With Cultural Ambassadors, we’ve connected and co-created programming with communities in Vietnamese, Khmer, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Korean.These gardening communities offer indelible insight into our local ecosystem, having adapted plants from all over the world to this specific climate.
- What are a some ways that people can get involved during the Covid-19 Crisis?
We love EFN’s Victory Garden campaign, because getting our hands in the dirt is one of the best things we can do for health, stress relief, and even helping our community since there are so many opportunities to share the harvest. Community gardens are still open with social distancing guidelines and practices in effect. As we move into Phase II, we should be able to start gleaning and doing small events again. For now, we are on telework status and have moved most of our programming online. Definitely follow our social media on Facebook and Instagram to see our livestreamed classes, Q&As, and more. We are trying to think creatively around what we can do offline while still distancing. We aren’t ready to announce it yet, but we have a couple of fun adaptations to some of our annual events that we’ve been talking about that don’t rely on Zoom or any other online platform. Stay tuned for updates!
- How are you collaborating with EFN’s Mother Earth Farm?
We love Mother Earth Farm! At least three of our current staff members have been interns at Mother Earth Farm, and have walked away with a deepened love for farming. We’ve regularly sent teams of gleaners to Mother Earth throughout the years, offering added help when other harvesting crews couldn’t make it to a particular crop. Upcoming, we are going to be collaborating again with Mother Earth Farm through our Gleaning Project by curating a small group of well-trained Harvest Leaders to come harvest regularly. This group is made up of Farm Foundations alumni, as well as some of our longer term gleaners who have been trained in how to harvest efficiently.
Two Farm Foundations Alumni are also running test plots at Mother Earth, practicing the ins and outs of planning, planting, and harvesting on a small scale. They will also be practicing selling to the food bank. This is a great opportunity for people to put everything they learned in Farm Foundations in motion.
We have also teamed up with Mother Earth Farm to help get Victory Garden starts out as far into the County as possible. Every other Wednesday, we’ve been bringing starts to four different community gardens that have opted to be public pickup sites for plant starts as a part of our Share the Harvest program. The four sites are in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood, University Place, Eatonville, and Graham.
We’re grateful for all that HPC is doing for the Community!