Background
Central Coast communities face unique challenges in the food sector: we are geographically remote, even from each other; we are reliant on precarious and expensive shipping systems; we are particularly vulnerable to climate change on the margins of the coast; and we face a dearth of information that is specific to our needs and climate.
Despite these challenges, Central Coast communities are also resilient, building programs that raise greenhouses and grow community gardens, support household gardening, fill food banks, hire underemployed commercial fishers to bring ancestral foods into Indigenous communities, enhance salmon stocks, implement restoration initiatives, run community kitchens, revitalize berry orchards and ancient fruit trees, plant food forests, and much more.
Our communities are each doing important work to address food systems resiliency in our own ways and we deserve support to build on our individual strength and elevate our food work through meaningful and adequately resourced collaboration.
It’s time to become intimate with our food systems and nurture nutritious abundance as an act of community care, a liberatory practice that upholds all of us through the joyful work of meeting the basic human need to sustain ourselves and our loved ones in alignment with our ancestral values of reciprocity and sustainability.
Our Team
Jess Housty is the founder and lead of Coastal Foodways. They are a Heiltsuk parent and food champion and resident of the Central Coast with more than two decades of experience supporting community-centred programs.
Jess leads this work with the support of an all-Indigenous, all-women Board of Directors: Jaimie Teagle, Desiree Lawson, and Marge Housty.
Emily Fera is our community hub lead, and she keeps our space on Denny Island running alongside her important work tending to her flocks of chickens and goats!
Kathy Sereda is our education lead, organizing regular workshops to build food skills that align with our seasons and needs.
Why Now?
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief the precarity of our supply chains and our dependence on unsustainable, unreliable food products and delivery services operating at a global scale. And climate change forces us to confront how we must change our practices to align with our ancestral values of sustainability and reciprocity, and how we can increase our agency and resilience by localizing our food systems and rooting them in community care.
We have an opportunity to develop this in the way we know works best: through a holistic approach that maximises community agency and engagement and creates the conditions for collective thriving. We want to give people the skills, confidence, practices, self-love/community care, tools, training, and opportunities to become informed and empowered food champions – so we can develop local food systems that mirror ancestral resilience and invite future thriving.
Our logo is an original design by Heiltsuk artist Blake Carpenter representing a salmon inside an egg. We chose this design to honour the important role that salmon play as a food source in the region, and in providing nourishment to wild ecosystems that support our plant and animal kin to thrive.
Our Logo
