St James Town CO-OP is a non-profit, community owned enterprise supporting the sustainable development of the St. James community. Their initiatives work for food security and resilience to climate change. Here is OFN’s Interview with St. James Town CO-OP.

OFN: Can you tell us about the St. James Town Community Co-op?

St. James Town CO-OP: The Community Co-op was started by a group of St. James Town residents and friends of the neighbourhood to build sustainability and inclusive community. St. James Town is Canada’s most diverse and densely-populated neighbourhood, as well as the second largest immigrant community in Toronto. We’re working to bring together community members from different languages, experiences, and socio-economic positions to share food and meaningful engagement that prioritizes collective learning and well-being. We strive for food security, resilience to climate crisis, economic stability, and collective community processes in our neighborhood. 

OFN: How does your Buying Program work?

St. James Town CO-OP:  Our Bulk Food Buying Club draws together our collective buying power so that we can get healthful, affordable, culturally-relevant, locally grown, and delicious food to our neighbors. We have two wholesale suppliers for dry foods, spices, and teas, and are currently collaborating with four different local farmers that provide us with really wonderful fresh produce. We survey community members for what they’d like us to order, open our shop on the Open Food Network for one week each month, and the following week we have our pick-up day! We’re still struggling to secure a permanent space in the community so the St. James Town Co-op Buying Club is still a little “fly by the seat of our pants,” but we’ve had incredible support from new and long-term volunteers! 

OFN:  How is your project contributing to the food justice movement?

St. James Town CO-OP: We’re ensuring a community that has been facing marginalization by the City, high density in a time when people need space to stay safe, and overwhelmed food banks can access some healthy and affordable foods! We also support our local, ecologically sound farmers (who use organic and/or permaculture practices) and are facing droughts, loss of sales, and are stuck with food that has to be tilled over because of a loss of labour and buyers. We’re also helping community members avoid the huge margins that supermarkets add to our food supplies. We’re a non-profit, human rights-based and volunteer run organization just working to get people good food!

OFN: What difficulties did COVID19 bring about to your co-op?

St. James Town CO-OP: COVID-19 has caused unattainable food prices, unstable food availability, and overburdened food banks for our community as a whole. We had to pause the bulk food buying club for a few months there and pandemic-safe procedures have required us to forgo our reusable container program, but we are hoping to find a way to become zero-waste again. We’ve also been unable to host community meals and conversations to connect with our community members and our partner organizations. It’s been hard to find out what people need, brainstorm solutions, and provide resources when we’re all isolating! We also had some programming plans for our community garden that had to be stalled. A big hit was to multi-year discussions with the City to secure permanent space in the community. We were going to get a shipping container for storage and a community kitchen, but the final steps of this process were put on hold for over 5 months with the onset of the pandemic. 

OFN: What is the community response like to your co-op? 

St. James Town CO-OP: There’s a lot of excitement around the Co-op! People are excited to buy food with us, to get some great produce from our local farms, and to discover that there is a community garden just around the corner. We were fortunate to have an excellent outreach team this summer that really got information out there, connected community members with our project and newsletter, and now we have a whole team of new volunteers that is growing all the time! We’ve got a lot of young people who are eager to support their community and families looking to feed themselves and their neighbors – people notice that this Co-op is needed here and they show it by continuing to show up for it!

OFN: Can you tell us about other initiatives that you have?

St. James Town CO-OP:  We’re currently developing our Eco-Just Food Network, through the Network we are making key demands in an open letter to the government and public, advocating for an ecologically-sound, climate prepared, and socially just secure food system. We invite you to read and sign our open letter.

The Eco-Just Food Network also works to connect farmers in need of an extra hand with our urban community members, and our community members with more local and healthy food. Through a timebanking process, where we trade time, skills, and resources instead of money, we are scaling up a resilient local food economy based on mutual aid. We also have deep connections with partners like the Conscious Minds Co-op who focus on youth led participatory learning in the context of food security and growing healthy communities. The OASIS project includes farmers in the tropics in a just trade partnership to help supply the food buying club during the long winter. Our urban rural healthy food mobilizing collective is committed to the Dish with One Spoon treaty of the great lakes and Indigenous and African food sovereignty. 

OFN: What’s in the future for your organization? 

St. James Town CO-OP:  We’ve got big plans for the future! We’re still looking to secure that shipping container and get ourselves some permanent space in the community.  The end goal is to establish a full-cycle food hub in St. James Town, called the Oasis Food Hub. Oasis will include sustainable methods for accessing water, growing food, cooking and preserving food, generating energy and managing/reusing organic resources. By up-cycling existing infrastructure and abandoned underground space in St. James Town, we hope to create vertical gardens and aquaponics systems to help feed our community and farmers year-round. The future for our organization is democratic community ownership, self-sustaining climate resilience, and the sharing of good foodways. We also hope to make Oasis full replicable, so anyone anywhere who shares these values can re-create what we’ve started.

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