Grow Your Food - Lets start!

I have recently started the Grow Your Food project with an aim to help reduce the growing food burden through community participation, while recycling waste in a productive manner. We all seek opportunities to contribute in an meaningful way to the city, world, environment and its people, and GYF project is a project which improves all these at one go.  Each volunteer is an important contributor and every small action of ours has the potential to change the world.

What is the Grow Your Food project?

Garden Fresh curry leaves

The GYF project endeavours to create a open-platform green revolution with community involvement and community management. The project is an attempt to encourage urban dwellers to grow a part of their own food conveniently in city-settings overcoming constraints of space and time. GYF project makes an opportunity of the vertical concrete spaces of the urban world to use them as sunshine groves by planting vertical gardens in windows and other open spaces. Grow Your Food is initially a Do-it-Yourself initiative - by each one creating their your own growing kits (with free information provided by the GYF).

How does the Grow Your Food project help?

The 'Grow Your Food' project reduces your food burden (according to the UN about a billion people do not get enough food to be active and healthy) and also helps recycle non-biodegradable and biodegradable waste. The growing-kits are made out of recycled bottles (85% of which still  goes into landfills) and they use much of your home wet-waste as compost as well. Through the GYF project you will help create more oxygen for earth and also create a fresh and green ambience at your living/working space. If you use the growing kits at home, not only will you get freshly grown vegetables but your family will appreciate and know what they eat. Apart from this, the GYF project is a great initiative to encourage family involvement in a common social activity. In children, this helps create a greater consciousness about nature, food, agriculture, social contribution and community collaboration.

Immediate aims of the GYF project:

Fresh, home grown basil

The very first aim of this project is activation and mobilization. Each home usually has the capacity to grow about 50 plants vertically (and that also means that 50 bottles will no longer go to a landfill). Add a few planters & pots to it and you could easily have about 100 vegetable plants growing right inside your home itself.  Starting with yourselves, GYF aims to have at least 100 home growers in 30 days. After that, in the next 30 days we hope that the first 100 volunteers will convert 5 additional home growers each. If we add 5 each after that every 30 days, we could have about 3,00,000 home growers in Mumbai alone by April 2013.

But that's just math. And can be only be made a reality if you put your effort behind it.

What are the immediate drives GYF project is undertaking?

1. Volunteer drive: Starting with Mumbai, the GYF project is looking for adult volunteers (or children accompanied by an adult) who can give their time and skills in activity social media, online design, creative design, agriculture, volunteer coordination, growing-kit construction, volunteer mobilization, home mobilization, work mobilization, finance management, business management, including several other specializations. GYF only believes in action participants, therefore to qualify as a volunteer it is first necessary to be a food grower - someone who grow a part of their food at their home/work.

If you interested, write to me at volunteer@comniscient.in (if possible also suggest how you would like to volunteer).

2. Plastic bottle collection drive: GYF is conducting a drive to collect plastic bottles (each bottle will support a plant or two) in clean and good condition in the 2 litre, 1 litre and 1/2 litre sizes.  To donate, please ensure you remove the label on the bottle and that you give it a nice wash before you deliver it. The bottles need to be delivered at the common area in Comniscient Group, 4th Floor, Kamal Mansion, Colaba, Mumbai - 5, anytime between 9 am to 6 pm on weekdays.

In case your family/spouse/children/friends are interested to join this initiative, please feel free invite them to this group/blog.

Now you really can make a change - join the Grow Your Food project now.