What your Congregation can do to help create a healthy local food system:

 

• Form a study group to explore what your faith tradition has to say about food, justice, and what God intends for all of us and for Creation.

• Band together to help one another plant home gardens at the beginning of each growing season.

• Start a local produce exchange table in your fellowship hall for your congregation’s gardeners.

• Assess your congregation’s eating habits: Are sugary sweets featured often? Are options available for diabetics at shared meals? Are ingredients labeled for people with allergies? Small changes, such as adding healthy alternatives, may be better received than large ones.

• Organize a Hunger Banquet to give people a taste of the unequal distribution of food around the world, and in our local community.

• Offer your congregation’s kitchen to be used for micro-enterprise food processing projects that add value to local foods.

• Form covenant groups to support changing food buying or eating habits (for example, agree to buy $15 worth of local food each week, etc.)

• Subsidize CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) shares or farmers’ market vouchers for families with limited resources.

• Find a copy of your congregation’s budget and review your congregation’s financial commitments. How is your congregation connected to hunger? What percentage of your budget reaches people struggle with hunger?

• Start a congregational garden and involve all ages.

• Invite a minority group of your congregation to host a meal of foods native to their culture. What can you learn about each other by eating each other’s food?

• In the Hebrew Bible, travelers who needed hospitality hung around the city gate and waited for someone to offer them bed and board. Is there a place where your congregation worships where people who might like to share a meal after worship can find each other?

• Start a weight loss group

• Advocate for change at a local grocery store—to carry more local produce and/or to donate food to your local Food Pantry.

• Plan a more in-depth study on a food topic, focusing on circumstances in your own community.

• Create a congregational cookbook which features healthful, locally grown food in season.

• Donate land at your place of worship to help those without space to grow their own food.

• Buy fair trade beverages and food for the congregation and to distribute to members of the congregation.

• Teach others about preserving local food by organizing canning and preserving sessions at your place of worship or in homes of members.

• Create a “Work of Our Hands” Directory for the congregation that shows photos of members and what each one has to offer

• Sponsor Home Eco-Parties (see information from Northwest Earth Institute) where members can bring a filled-in checklist of their practices related to food, energy, water, etc.

 

If you are local to the Flat Rock, Alabama area and would like more information on how your church can become a participating member of the Flat Rock Community Center, please email a detailed request including your name and contact information to contact@flatrockcommunitycenter.org. Someone will contact you as soon as possible to discuss your request.

 

Thank you!

FRCC