A new community centre has opened its doors after months of planning, planting and pruning and is looking for students to get involved with creating a system of sustainable and edible food security
The Ville Community Centre is a not-for-profit organization located in the former Alexander Gibson Memorial School on Fredericton’s North Side.
“This is a centre for students,” said Jeff MacFarlane, the executive director.
“(Students) have no preconceived notions of how things should be, the sky’s the limit, they open up their horizon. We want engaged, active people involved here to help grow this vision,”
Macfarlane said he hopes to get students involved with the Ville in any way possible.
He says students are some of the best candidates to becoming members of the cooperative because of this openness and readiness.
Mcfarlane hails from the small New Brunswick town of Stanley, where he originally came up with the idea of bringing back the quintessential community centre.
The new centre is huge – the old school rooms are filling up fast with different groups and activities available to the public like martial arts classes, zumba dancing and art lessons.
But the main goal of the project is to have sustainable and edible food security; to allow people to grow, till and then pick their own hard work.
For Macfarlane, this project is bigger than just students: it’s for the whole community.
“I started this project in hopes to bring back our recreation centres and open up our schools to our communities, to give some safe places for kids to go and hang out and stay out of trouble,”
Macfarlane remembers a few weeks back seeing a young family walk by one of these gardens, only to have their smallest child stop and admire one of the Ville’s gardens.
The youngster told her father they could make supper from that garden.
“You could just see how excited she was and she went and helped herself to some carrots and squash.
To me that in a nutshell made all the hard work that we’ve been doing so far worth it.”
Macfarlane says although the centre’s branches have a long way to go, the possibilities can only grow from here: even now one of the centre’s gardens has enough swiss chard in it to supply two families for a whole summer. .
“We hope to have some great things happen here and the more people that get involved the greater its going to be,” said Macfarlane. “If we can start to transform and get people back to growing our own gardens and showing how accessible and fun it is that will be some of our key goals.”
