Our mission is to facilitate transitions towards food sovereign communities by practicing regenerative agriculture to nourish local populations, cultivate urban green spaces and to support sustainable food production. We offer urban agriculture workshops and community service learning opportunities to empower people with the knowledge to grow their own food and participate in a movement to cultivate a more resilient, just and food secure future. We see our work as a political act and look to create networks of reciprocity and connection with other groups who share a deep commitment to social justice and food sovereignty.
Made by Meghan Kerr, Julia Lehmann & Kitty Lin, Students at Concordia University.
Mohammed is a biologist, specializing in plant ecology and phytochemistry, with more than 17 years of experience in sustainability agroforestry and nature conservation. He has managed and been involved in many projects and programs with agroforestry and food security components directly benefiting less privileged communities and smallholder farmers and their ecosystem, in Canada and the middle east respectively. Mohammed is a member of the food literacy committee, under Montreal West Island Community Resource Centre, he is also the CEO of Permaculture Sainte Anne de Bellevue (PSADB), which is a nonprofit organization established by the "Moving Towards Sustainability" Fund of Sainte Anne de Bellevue municipality. Under PSADB he managed many agroecology urban projects including Duff-Court Neighborhood Life Committee urban farm and two other urban gardens in Montreal. Mohammed is a member of the food literacy committee, under Montreal West Island Community Resource Centre, he is also the CEO of Permaculture Sainte Anne de Bellevue (PSADB), which is a nonprofit organization established by the "Moving Towards Sustainability" Fund of Sainte Anne de Bellevue municipality. Under PSADB he managed many agroecology urban projects including Duff-Court Neighborhood Life Committee urban farm and two other urban gardens in Montreal.
As a part-time professor at Concordia University, Erik has taught Food and Culture and Food and Sustainability, and provided his students with opportunities for hands-on learning and critical-participatory-action-research. He enables his students to learn by doing and empowers them to become community leaders, urban farmers, and sustainability activists. With a strong interest in the political economy of ethical food systems, Erik has meticulously chronicled Concordia’s student-run food cooperatives through his PhD in Humanities. His community involvement in sustainability at Concordia includes the Concordia Food Coalition, Divest Concordia, the Hive Café Co-op, and more. He has also founded a number of organizations, research projects and educational programs, including the non-profit solidarity urban farming cooperative CultivAction.
Kim Gagnon is passionate about growing food and has transformed three urban backyards into lush biodiverse urban food gardens. She is a co-founder, farmer and communications person at Coop CultivAction.
Kim is also a freelance Graphic Designer, photographer and a digital arts educator at Coop Collective Vision, the co-founder of Creative Video Day Camp and is studying Art Education at Concordia University.
Has lived and played on the island of Tiohtià:ke (“Montreal”) his whole life. He’s been at CultivAction doing community outreach, farming, driving, coordinating volunteer sessions and facilitating meetings since our first growing season. John Nathaniel comes to co-operative farming with an interest in building committed relationships to land and how food brings people together across difference. Today John Nathaniel studies Community, Public Affairs and Policy Studies, as well as First People’s Studies and Human Environment (Geography) at Concordia University. When not growing food you can find John Nathaniel at the local basketball court or ice cream parlor.
Nico is a sociology undergrad student at Concordia residing in Tiohtià:ke. At Co-op CultivAction, Nico is the Loyola farm manager, mushroom program coordinator, microgreens coordinator, urban agriculture and urban foraging educator, and social media coordinator. Co-op CultivAction materializes Nico’s commitment to mitigating the effects of factory farming, climate change, environmental racism such as food deserts; and as one way to lessen the socio-enviro effects of centralized, colonial food and medicine systems. They also prioritize growing native pollinator plants intercropped between annual vegetable plants to help feed and increase native pollinator populations. Nico inoculates our farmland with mushroom mycelium they grow in our lab to help retain moisture, prevent disease spreading to plants, increase soil microbial activity, and efficiently disperse nutrients throughout our plots. They believe that weeding a small flower bed is a radical political act! When they are not farming, Nico runs a small business making hyperlocal, all grown within a 10km radius, homegrown and/or foraged herbal medicines and other handmade goods @nicosnovelties.
Caleb lives and farms in Tiohtià:ke, traditional and unceeded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. He coordinates Co-op CultivAction’s Microgreens Program in the Concordia Greenhouse and works with the Co-op at the Duff Ct. Urban Farm. Caleb has spent the last three seasons working on an organic vegetable farm in the Outaouais and is now studying Community Affairs and Policy Studies at Concordia. He believes that building a strong food solidarity economy is crucial to overcoming extreme economic injustice and the climate crisis. There is nothing Caleb loves more than working in a hot greenhouse in the middle of the winter.
Narcisse is an ecology undergraduate student at Concordia. She grew up playing in the mud of the South Shore and developed a love for Nature while unsuccessfully climbing trees. A scientist through and through she likes to keep track of our microgreen metrics and all the diverse species that visit our garden, most notably the endangered monarch butterfly. Narcisse is also our most clumsy worker-member and frequently depletes the bandages in the first aid kit. Fun fact, she volunteered with CultivAction on her first day of school and has loved the farm (and all the people at it) ever since.
Lena is an undergraduate student at Concordia in sexuality studies and human environment. Lena is from the prairies where they worked in greenhouses, tending to cucumbers and tomatoes in particular, and building a relationship with these plants that continues to excite them about farming to this day. They see CultivAction as a world-building project that offers an exciting alternative to current capitalist models of governance and food production, and instead imagines and materially affects the ways people access and understand their relationships to food, the land, and each other.
Coop CultivAction envisions a biodiverse, and abundant campus-community foodscape (beneficial plants, animals, insects, nutritious food, healthy soil etc.) that facilitates hands on community education and engagement and builds social and economic justice.
We are grateful for the support of the Co-operators Cooperative Development Program, which has provided important funding support to CultivAction’s programs.
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