Little voice
CERES seems smaller than the ten inner-city acres it covers in Brunswick East.
It’s all nooks and crannies; behind treelines and down winding paths there’s a playground of scrounged tyres and old robot parts, an inexplicable train carriage, a leafy chook retirement home, a cluster of poly tunnels, a huddle of beehives, a Wurundjeri learning shelter, a corner for bike recyclers, a quarry hut turned office, a retrofitted California bungalow, an animal stable turned grocery, a nursery powered by the passion of plant nerds….
And apart from the nice buildings near the Stewart St gate, which I’m still getting used to 15 years on, most things at CERES look sort of homemade and humanscale.
Purposefully so – CERES’ smallness, its nook and crannyness, makes it accessible, understandable, copyable, so that anyone or any group can take away and make anything they see or do here in their own backyard or community.
In their small teams the farmers, teachers and retail workers operate with a low-key modesty that serves to obscure CERES’ true size even further.
With all these disparate parts, people, even those who work here, often struggle to explain what CERES is. In media stories flummoxed journos default to calling CERES a community garden.
And yet when all the individual pieces of CERES are cobbled together it adds up to a kind of hard rubbish, patchwork giant that doesn’t quite understand how large, how special its footprints and their impact are on the people who live around it.
There are only a handful of places like CERES around the world – communities like Findhorn in Scotland, Auroville in India, Christiania in Denmark.
When I tell visitors more than 200 people work here they look askance between me, the chooks, the school kids and the veggies.
Where? they demand, forehead creased.
I patiently explain that along with Joe’s Garden, Fair Wood and Fair Food, CERES is four sites, a school, eighteen social enterprises, plus gardeners, cleaners, a maintenance crew, a finance team, HR, visitors centre, marketing and governance people – all these little parts add up.
And this is only the paid staff; there are hundreds of regular and one-off volunteers who turn up every week to help or to bring events like Olives to Oil and Winter Solstice to life.
There’s a dichotomy to being big but feeling small, which has made it hard for CERES to ask for what it needs to keep all of these pieces together.
In past annual appeals CERES has called out in a little voice and raised fifty or sixty thousand dollars and been thankful to receive that.
This year, facing a crisis that threatened to overwhelm it CERES found its voice and for the first time called out to our community for the help its always needed.
I just looked now at the appeal page now and around 2000 people have given over $320,000.
Tomorrow is the last day of the financial year, a lot of us will do our annual giving on this day.
If you would like to contribute to keeping this unique, this inspiring, hard rubbish patchwork giant walking in our community – here’s the link.
Of course donating isn’t the only way to help – there are many ways to make a contribution;
- share CERES appeal with your friends and family on Facebook or Insta
- buy a coffee, your groceries or plants or timber or a workshop from one of CERES social enterprises
- Or you could draw some heartwarming graffiti like this one below found in a CERES toilet.
Have a great week
Chris
