Ebony's Pearls

Unless inspiration hits, I'm calling my new charity project "Food Forever".

I've been thinking about ways and means for moving this forward, for implementing it, advertising it, and in general getting it done.

While I can do this charity alone, I think it will be more effective if others were involved. The more people there are who are planting edibles in waste spaces and neglected places, the more food there will be available for others to wildcraft. The more people who are speaking up about Food Forever, the more likely it will be to have food growing everywhere forever. The more people who are talking about Food Forever, the more aware others will be about the need for food to be widely and freely available. "No hungry tummy" should be our goal.

Money isn't an issue. Implementing "Food Forever" is actually a low-cost project. We don't even have to buy seeds; we can harvest them from the foods we normally eat and from the foods we grow in our home gardens. We can salvage plants from the trash of nurseries, and we can use a variety of guerrilla gardening techniques to acquire plants and seeds.

I'd like to see this spread to the classroom, too. Teach children to plant edibles wherever they go - seeds are life that wants to grow, produce more seeds and be eaten. It's a project that can teach children a wide range of things - from farming, environmental consciousness, homelessness, social change, and charity to biology and earth sciences.

Gardening doesn't have to be confined to neat, tidy beds. It can happen anywhere, in any vacant space.

While most homeless people will benefit from the end result of wanton seeding, some will be inspired to get involved, too, and will sow seeds, and possible even tend these transient hidden gardens. I want to teach them how to find food growing in the waste spaces of a city. The urban "wilderness" has lots of food if people just knew where to look and when and how to harvest it. Most places still have gleaning laws on the books, and it's possible to use those laws to further the Food Forever project.

Unlike community gardens, we won't need dedicated space for our project, won't need to have volunteers out weeding and watering, and we won't need people to prevent others from harvesting the produce. We won't see the gardens abandoned in the middle of the growing season as the weeds defeats the volunteers. The gardens won't be in remote places that people will have to travel to get to, or need trucks to haul out the produce.

The whole focus of this project is to simply grow food where no food is growing now. Instead of waiting until halfway through the gardening season to abandon the garden, we'll start out planning for the gardens to be abandoned practically as soon as the seeds hit the ground. The food will be grown in accessible places for the poor and homeless to get to, tucked under bridges, in back lots of abandoned buildings, in waste spaces around town where weeds and stones grow now. The goal is to teach people how to find food growing around and how to eat it. How we think about gardening will be redefined. Where we think gardens should be will be redefined.

I'm preparing a series of classroom materials, some for school students, some for the homeless, some for potential volunteers. I'm also working on some brochures to teach people how to make seed bombs and how to save seeds from the foods they eat to toss (or plant, if they're so inclined) around town in vacant lots and abandoned places. One last booklet I'm preparing is a field guide, an identification booklet to finding edibles in the urban "wilds".

The first two I can afford to produce on my own. I can make them into printable .pdf files for downloading, and I can print out copies to use here locally. A little paper and ink is cheap enough.

I'm hoping to find a sponsor for the booklet. Ideally, I'd like it to be sturdy and waterproof, which means probably laminated in some way. That's way more than I can afford to produce on my own. I'll still make it available in a .pdf for others to download and print out, and I'll print plain paper copies to share, but I'd really like good quality, waterproof ones to give to the homeless and to pass out at food banks, and maybe even get the state to hand out copies to people receiving food stamps. That would be awesome.

I may put the entire project together in a book that I'll put up at Lulu.com.

I'm undecided on whether I'll offer the book at the cost Lulu.com charges for producing it or if I should add a royalty to it that I could use to help fund the project (the waterproof field guide...). I'm leaning heavily towards "at cost" and finding other sources to produce the waterproof field guide.

All the rest of the project is quite cheap. It's a project that takes time and effort (minimal effort, really), but not a lot of money.

Since I am seeking a sponsor for the field guide, I suppose I'll have to take the steps to get the charity registered with the IRS so the sponsor(s) can use it for a tax deduction.

This means, of course, having to comply with a host of federal and other government regulations that I've successfully avoided by keeping my past charities as personal ones that didn't need donations. But, you gotta do what you gotta do. And I feel I have to do this, whatever it takes.