Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize: Spring Letter Home From Home.

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1 Juan Manuel Velez 1 Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize: Spring Letter Home From Home. The past two months I have been working with people from different neighborhoods and organizations in Manizales, building food gardens and doing different kinds of workshops about food and territorial sovereignty. To organize these initiatives, we created The Network of Sovereign Urban Gardeners (La Red de Agricultores Soberanos), a network of urban gardeners constituted with participants of different neighborhoods. We have organized so-called Mingas, which are days on which members from different communities get together to build new gardens, to work on those that already exist in the city, or to to do a workshop. Minga is a Quechua word meaning collective work. It s a working system used by indigenous communities in Latin Americas as a community service system. By doing mingas, our network has been growing in celebration to this indigenous tradition. Our work has been focused on maintaining the food garden in Comunativa -my partner organization- and we also have began a large food garden in one of the campus of one of our public universities, the Universidad de Caldas.

2 Juan Manuel Velez 2 Comunativa is located in San Jose, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. About five years ago, thousands of people were displaced to open space for a large development project, which included the largest mall in the city and a mile-long avenue crossing through the neighborhood. Since then, the youth from San Jose has organized different forms of resistance, which includes a museum showing the history of the neighborhood before the development project. Our workshops seek to to support these efforts to maintain the territorial memory in the neighborhood and to open an space for people to share their knowledge and skills. This year, we had workshop on seed sovereignty in which we started a seed bank. We also had a workshop on traditional recipes led by Martha, a woman who has lived in San Jose for more than five decades and who owns the home where Comunativa is located. In her workshops, Martha teaches other women from the neighborhood to bake traditional cakes, which later they sell in the street. The main objective is to encourage them to start a small business that could provide them with an alternative source of income. This month we ll also have a workshop about healthy diets and traditional food, led by a chef who owns a well-known vegetarian restaurant in the city.

3 Juan Manuel Velez 3 In the coming months I will be organising a series of workshops on Compost. I m partnering with a local agronomist who will led the workshops. Compost is a important pillar of urban farming, serving a multi-functional purpose, providing a model of waste management while ferelizing urban soils. It s of vital importance to conscientize urban farmers of the importance of having healthy soils in our farms, because urban soils are often polluted with lead and other heavy metals. The goal of this part of my project is to improve the composting methods used in our farms, and to build a model of composting that can be replicable in other urban farms in the city. Having the opportunity to come back to my hometown to work with so many amazing people has been tremendously inspiring to me. Community organizing has also been very challenging and humbling. Sometimes, things don t go as smooth as I wish, but it s very rewarding. I wake up everyday excited and grateful for the work we are doing.

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