How to make a difference
How can I make a difference?
Gathered beside the small pond above the community garden with a group of donors to the recent CERES’ annual appeal – this is the question we’re here to answer.
I’ve chosen the pond because this little body of water serves as a kind of a metaphor for the primeval soup that gave life to CERES.
In the beginning, it was teachers like Noel Blencowe and other locals who volunteered their time to clean up the old Brunswick East tip site so that students could come and learn hands-on about biodiversity, recycling, alternative energy and where their food came from.
The kids loved being outside, getting their hands into the Earth, learning more than they would in front of a blackboard.
When other schools put their hands up to bring their students here it was clear CERES was onto something.
A few small, two thousand dollar grants paid for teachers like Eric Bottomley to work a day or two a week, developing new lessons and slowly adding pieces of infrastructure – gardens, seating areas, a paper-making shelter and of course the pond.
Four and a half decades later this education program that started among the weeds and rubble on an old rehabilitated tip site will welcome its two millionth student.
Its lessons have spread into the curriculum of every Victorian School and formed the blueprint for environmental education across Australia.
And the creation of this small pond that we sit around, where every fish has been caught a hundred times in nets and jars giving children an inkling of the web of life that connects us all, is an example of the how we make a difference at CERES; some people giving their time, making use of some unloved space with a little bit of money to help it all happen.
These three elements; time, space, a little bit of money, we will find repeated again and again walking through CERES – it’s here in the volunteer-run CERES Bee Group ; a monthly free beekeeping education session in a forgotten farm corner that has launched a generation of urban beekeepers and neighbourhood micro-honey businesses.
The same again in the CERES Seedling Propagation; where a couple of young nurserymen, dozens of volunteers, a spare polytunnel and some tiny grants changed Melbourne’s backyard vegetable gardens with its organic heirloom seeds and an incredible twenty-five varieties of tomatoes.
Neither would have existed without the Honey Lane market garden, started in a spare goat paddock by a group of determined urban farmers with a little funding.
The market garden would open the way for CERES Grocery, Joe’s Garden, CERES Produce Swap, Fair Food, Fair Wood, the Complete Urban Farmer Course, the Harvest and Solstice Festivals and on and on and on.
Together, little piece by little piece all the parts of CERES form a beautiful interconnected web of places, people, schools, social enterprises and stories.
CERES is the work of so many over so many years and it will always depend on the faith and generosity of people giving their time, finding some space and a little bit of money to make it all happen.
And this takes the pressure off us to be the one to have to make the big difference by ourselves – no one person has all three elements, no one can be the whole web, we can only ever be a strand.
Fair Fizz
If you have a Sodastream* or similar bubble facilitating machine and you’re displeased by the high price of gas refills then you might want to give Fair Fizz a go.
We love the idea of not having to buy a plastic bottle every time you want a fizzy drink, but we don’t love paying through the nose for the privilege.
Right now at $10 a refill Fair Fizz is around half the price of your regular cylinder swap.
This is how it works:
– If you have an empty SodaStream or other brand cylinder, choose a Fair Fizz Trade-In to swap over to Fair Fizz (remember to leave your other branded cylinder out for your driver to collect – we’ll reunite it back to the company it came from).
– Once you have a Fair Fizz cylinder, all your refills are just $10. Just add a Fair Fizz Refill to your next order and leave your empty Fair Fizz cylinder out for your driver to collect and we’ll swap it for a full one.
– And if you have a soda maker and just need a new cylinder, simply add a New Fair Fizz cylinder to your Fair Food order and we’ll drop it off.
You can find out all there is to know about Fair Fizz here.
Have a great week
Chris
*Fair Fizz cylinders are compatible with all soda makers, excluding the new Sodastream Quick Connect machines.
