How can we as a community ensure that a steady supply of nutritious food is available to everyone after a natural disaster?
Do we go down the prepper’s path – stockpiling tonnes of canned food and tanks full of drinking water, or is there a better way?
This key question will be the subject of four upcoming workshops being run across the Northern Rivers, with the Byron event kicking off from May 11.
Run by local not-for-profit organisation Plan C, the Rising Together workshops are designed to help ensure our community’s ongoing access to food in the aftermath of the 2022 floods and in anticipation of more challenges to come.
‘I think with people seeing empty shelves after the 2002 floods, it showed that “okay, well, yes, this really is an issue”,’ said the founder and CEO of Plan C, Dr Jean Renouf.
‘Food drops had to be organised for people who were cut off, and we also saw that, for those who were already in a precarious position, the floods really made getting the basics like food extremely challenging.’
Response to demand
The workshops, which were a response to community demand, will provide an early step in addressing these food security challenges by exploring four key areas: ways to access land for food cultivation, region-wide initiatives for addressing food security, and key strategies for food preparedness that each of us can implement right now.
‘The key principle is diversity of access to food,’ Dr Renouf said.
‘From a prepper’s, perspective, it’s a year’s worth of canned food and, yes, that’s one option. But there’s also growing, exchanging, buying food directly from the farm, raising your own (animal-based) food and fishing.
‘We want our community to be able to access food from a multiplicity of places and then to have multiple options for storing. Cans are really only one option, there’s also freeze-drying, dehydrating, pickling – there are a lot of alternative options out there.’
The overarching themes of the workshop are skill building, exchanging information and connecting – continuing the theme that resilience is achieved collectively rather than individually.
Four workshops
The four workshops will take place in Byron (May 11), Lismore (May 17), Kyogle (June 14) and Casino (June 15), with seven additional sessions planned for later in the year.
With the project funded through the Northern Rivers Community Foundation (NRCF), attendance is free.
However, with numbers capped at 25 people per session, spaces are likely to be snapped up fast.
For more information and to register, go to www.planc.org.au/rising-together.
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