Common Unity Grow Kit

Food plays an important part in our lives. It brings whānau and communities together and is one of the most important ways we share and celebrate our culture and family traditions. Common Unity is dedicated to food. Growing it, cooking it, and sharing it by feeding as many people in our community as we can, celebrating the goodness of our soil, from the actions of our hands and the heartfulness of wanting to bring home local food solutions into our neighbourhoods. Since Covid, we've focused on our Community Food Hub, providing over 96,000 meals to the community and expanding our farm network which has included Rimutaka Prison, Agrihood backyard farms and Epuni care and protection, and Epuni School; making it 12 farms in total we have developed over 10 years. Some of these farms are now on pause as we embed learnings and relationships.

And we want to share our learnings with you.

First we’re going to cover your operating model. Next we’ll go onto funding your urban kai farm and then a video about the land you are planning on using. We will cover staff and volunteers, some important discussion on governance and administration We then get onto planning your planting, how to rethink waste, and finally, the importance of food safety. At the end of the course you will have a good understanding of what an urban kai farmer ‘looks like’, what an urban farmer is able to accomplish, and what is required to set up an urban kai farm.

We encourage you to print out the checklists and use these to create a business plan for your project.

Please compile feedback throughout the course and feel free to share this with us upon completion at growkit@cupa.org.nz

If you would like to learn more, we invite you to check out our documentary, launched in February 2022 by Happen Films: "Together We Grow"

Thanks for learning with us.