Our work is guided by decades of diverse experiences in supporting school and community food stewardship and service. Flourish was born from work between core collaborating agencies, wrangled together by our first staff (Matthew Kemshaw and Alison Ryan). The core collaborators who birthed us were: the Victoria Community Food Hub Society, the Capital Region Food Share Network, The Mustard Seed Street Church, Farm to School BC, and the Sooke School District #62. These founders worked together in the 2022/23 school year to create the Setting the Table school food pilot project, which aimed to feed 200 students per day for 100 days across eight schools and build the systems to support a flourishing school food program in the Sooke School District.

 

We are advocating for and working to support the development of a universal, cost-shared school meal program.

 

Long before our founding collaborators created Flourish! a broader group of organizations led years of participatory learning, seeking to understand how they could best support the schools of our region to create truly healthy school food environments. These organizations organized together as part of what they called the School Food Shift Collaborative. This collaborative was founded by: the Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable (CR-FAIR), the LifeCycles Project Society, Farm to School BC, the Capital Region Food Share Network, and Island Health’s Healthy Schools Program. Over the years the following organizations joined the School Food Shift Collaborative: Growing Chefs!, Growing Young Farmers, the South Island FarmHub, The Mustard Seed, and Kitchen Connect. Flourish would not exist were it not for the concerted effort and vision provided by many years of collaboration and visioning between these key community organizations.

 

Flourish continues to work collectively as part of the Coalition for Healthy School Food. When we started, Canada was one of the few industrialized countries without a national school food program. We are proud to have been involved in advocacy to change that, and continue to push for improvements to Canada's current patchwork of school food programming, which reaches only a small percentage of our over five million students. We are advocating for and working to support the development of a universal, cost-shared school meal program. To learn more about the Coalition and why this work matters, visit: