Concordia Student Course Offering Description
This 13 week urban agriculture course is for adults of all ages who want to learn how to grow nutritious food in an urban setting. Whether you are looking to transform your property into an edible garden, learn how to maintain a community garden, or you want to improve your existing gardening skills, this course will provide you with theoretical knowledge and practical skills to support your journey towards becoming more self-sufficient.
Agriculture is one of the leading sources of global pollution, industrial farming is destroying our biosphere and chemical pesticides and fertilizers have negative effects on our health. Buying locally grown food is a great way to minimize your environmental impact, and learning to grow your own food is even better! Food prices are on the rise; Canada’s Food Price Report 2022 predicts a 5% to 7% increase this year alone. Growing your own food is a rewarding way to reduce your carbon footprint, save money and learn practical skills that you can share with others. Whatever your motivation, with a little bit of knowledge and practice, it is possible to grow an abundance of healthy fruits and vegetables and participate in a movement to cultivate a more resilient and food secure future.
This course is for anyone who is interested in learning about gardening, urban farming, and urban permaculture. Students in this course will gain knowledge on how to produce food in their own yards, community/collective gardens, and other urban spaces. For those who don’t have access to an urban space for practice, we will offer training opportunities on one of Coop CultivAction’s farms to get the most out of the course.
Students will learn:
This course is SUBSIDIZED for up to 20 eligible CONCORDIA STUDENTS by the Sustainability Action Fund (SAF) through the Sustainability Living Lab Funding Program
COST: $600 (for 13 weeks)
TUESDAY COURSE
DATES: June 7 – August 30, 2022
LOCATION: Loyola Farm – At Concordia University in NDG
TIME: 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Optional training opportunities are available throughout the week.
Concordia Students can get credit for this course. Contact Erik Chevrier to see if you qualify.
Erik Chevrier has been a driver of sustainable food systems at Concordia University as a part-time professor, activist and student.
As a part-time professor, Erik had 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.
Dr. Mohammed Al-Duais 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 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. Dr. Al-Duais has significant expertise in university teaching, project and NGO management, technical reporting and auditing, grant writing, products development, team supervision, and capacity building.
Dr. Al-Duais received his Ph.D. in Biology from Friedrich Schiller University, Germany. He served as an Assistant Professor at Ibb University and as the director of the Foundation for Endangered Wildlife (FEW), both in Yemen and was the Natural Science Specialist in the UNESCO Doha Office. He was a Fulbright fellow at the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory of the University of Rhode Island in the USA for one year. He was also reinvited in the summer of 2013 to the Institute of Nutrition, Friedrich Schiller University, where he continued the phytochemical investigation on less-used vegetables from Yemen ethnobotany. Dr. Al-Duais is currently serving as a Research Associate at the McGill Institute for Global Food Security. He is involved in the interdisciplinary research on global food security, with a focus on developing novel methodologies, with a comprehensive ecosystem approach, to tackling the cycle of poverty and malnutrition. Out of his research activities, many concept notes were submitted to partners and he is the CEO and co-founder “Harvest for Health Inc.”, a McGill startup focused on solving the globally increasing hidden hunger and its consequences.
Relevant to Dr. Al-Duais involvement in food security he 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 island, Canada.
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