The UM Campus Farm will enhance community and education opportunities, fostering sustainable food citizenship through experiential learning that grows not only food, but leadership, conversations, and collaboration.
Leader
Ryan Gourley
Location
1800 N. Dixboro Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Impact areas
Our project focuses on establishing and enhancing community and education at the Campus Farm. Users of the Farm will develop the requisite skills to meet today’s sustainability challenges, deriving a variety of solutions that are place-based and participatory in nature. Our objective is to position the Campus Farm as a community hub and premier educational space for sustainable food.
We are raising funds to develop the Campus Farm as a living-learning laboratory, a collaborative space for the community to explore adaptive local solutions to global food issues in the form of small-scale, on-site experiments. The funds will be used to build both the infrastructure and relationships necessary to support the mission of the Campus Farm, which is to build a strong community network, promote education, and provide sustainable food.
Living-learning laboratory projects will be initiated through a RFP procedure in which any community member may propose a project to be incubated in the Campus Farm space. Preliminary proposals have included an outdoor kitchen, outdoor classroom space, art installations, educational signage, websites and mobile apps, renewable energy projects, an irrigation system, and permaculture demonstration plots. As one can see, our project bridges the collective interest of many disciplines and provides an open table for theory and practice to merge into tangible progress. Innovative research and ideas will be on display for visitors from the campus and community to experience first-hand. To support student-initiated projects, we are raising funds to start a student materials fund.
Project Timeline
August 2013 — April 2014
August 2013
September 2013
October 2013
November 2013
December 2013
January 2014
February 2014
March 2014
April 2014
With the growing impacts of climate change and threats to a cheap and abundant supply of energy, the need to foster resiliency and adaptation at the local scale is increasingly pertinent. Colleges and universities provide a ready-made platform for students and communities to pre-familiarize themselves with future alternative scenarios and experiment with small-scale adaptations. The campus farm in particular is perfectly poised for this role. The unifying nature of food serves as a gateway to building networks for community engagement. This project envisions the UM Campus Farm as a living-learning laboratory, a test kitchen for small-scale experiments to explore a myriad of possible solutions that are participatory and place-based.
