Community Availability

An initial project community assessment pointed to clear interest in the process of planting fruit-bearing plants in the community. Maintenance of trees/plants is a key issue and having a strong group of trained volunteers ensures the well-being of the trees. The project attempted to address this through offering practical and theoretical workshops and events in fruit tree/plant care. Building this core group of volunteers proved to be somewhat more difficult. There was a Community Coordinator in each community, who with a small honorarium, helped organize and promote the workshops; they attended most of the training series. A key member of each site also more than likely attended the workshops offered around the time of the planting. However, the communities and/or landowners involved in "adopting" the trees were not able or willing to come to all workshops. The full component of training workshops were designed to build consecutively a base of skills.

LifeCycles and Community Coordinators worked to address this by giving a 1 month advance notice of for each workshop. Workshop information was arranged in an attractive and easily printable format sent to Community Coordinators to print for posting, inclusion in their newsletters and emails to their own community volunteers/GFNG participants. Even with this advance planning and notification, it was still difficult to attract a large group to workshops. Understandably, attending required a considerable time commitment. Extra handouts of all the workshop material were made for Community Coordinators to create an onsite resource file and to hand out to interested parties.

Our recommendation for addressing this in the future is to:

1. ensure that community groups/landowners interested in planting fruit trees are clearly informed of their commitment to care for them. Community Coordinators, representing different institutions, signed a community agreement that included maintenance and care. A modified agreement would have helped strengthen the emphasis on long-term maintenance.
2. decide on training dates 6 months in advance and produce a training calendar so that community members can plan to attend well in advance. We will be employing this strategy in 2006 for other training-oriented LifeCycles projects, at the recommendation of community members.
3. Promote the training series to the wider Victoria community through media and events calendars to build general community capacity as well as targeted community capacity.

One additional challenge the project faced was the withdrawal of the Burnside-Gorge Community Association and James Bay Community Project in the early stages of the project. Burnside-Gorge hesitated in supporting and joining the GFNG project due to lack of coordinating staff capacity and eventually decided that they could not allocate staff time to the project. LifeCycles approached the Fernwood Community, who gladly adopted the project goals, budget and became part of the process. Similarly, despite stated support for the project, the James Bay Community Association was unable to commit to GFNG. Due to LifeCycles' location and familiarity with this community, LifeCycles staff worked directly with interested community members by coordinating plantings in apartment complexes and at the James Bay Community Project. Efforts were extended to include two other community in addition to James Bay and Burnside-Gorge. Fairfield Community Association and the University of Victoria were welcomed as community partners and fruitful additions to the Good Fruit N Greenways Project.