Community Food Security and the Seattle P-Patch Program

What is Community Food Security?
It is when all community members obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.

At the P-Patch Program we work to improve our Communities’ Food Security through:

• Programs
• Policy

Programs

Growing your own Community gardens give everyone the opportunity to grow healthy food for themselves and their families. This can be especially important in areas where healthy produce is hard to find or too expensive in neighborhood stores.

Sharing the Harvest P-Patchers in Seattle go beyond just growing food for themselves. Each year they grow and donate more than ten tons of produce to neighborhood food banks! 30 P-Patches have active food bank gardening programs thanks to our collaboration with the Lettuce Link Program at Solid Ground.

Seattle Market Gardens Urban market gardens and Community Supported Agriculture enterprises help establish safe, healthy communities and economic opportunity for low income families in South Seattle. Each year, in-city farmers grow high-quality, farm-fresh, organic produce for approximately 100 member households during the growing season.

Immigrant Gardening Focus Through Cultivating Communities and our work with Lao Mien and Latino gardeners we are able to offer gardening opportunities that bring cheap, safe and culturally appropriate food to family’s tables

Planting Seeds Our Cultivating Youth program educates young kids about cooking, nutrition, and gardening, giving them life skills to ensure their families and communities are healthy and well-fed into the future.

Policy

Many of the reasons that communities and families are “food insecure” are complex and far-reaching. Working for Food Justice sometimes means taking a big picture approach to improve the policies that shape how our food is produced and who gets to eat it.

Seattle King County Acting Food Policy Council
P-Patch serves on this council that brings together local government, non-profit organizations, and community members who have a wide range of expertise on food issues including hunger relief, farming, health, nutrition, food retail, industry, food safety, workers, and urban planning to find solutions. The group is strengthening ties with the City of Seattle and King County to establish an official council that will advise and partner with the jurisdictions to address our local concerns.

By bringing all of these different people and organizations together, Food Policy Councils find new ways to solve continuing systematic problems such as hunger, food access, nutritional health, and agricultural sustainability that often fall between the cracks of the scope and focus of many separate agencies and organizations. To learn more about the Seattle King County Acting Food Policy Council please visit: http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/foodpolicycouncil.htm