FERN AVENUE COMMUNITY GARDEN, a suburban food forest in Adelaide, South Australia, was the welcoming and inspiring venue for the April 2015 gathering of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network.

There, in the community garden's solar-powered, water-harvesting strawbale community building, people from as far afield as Far North Queensland, Western Australia and Sydney came together to review the past year in community garden development and to plan for coming years.

Community gardening, the cooperative, DIY approach to urban food production, continues to grow in Australia's cities. Now established, the practice is contributing to the building of resilient food systems and cities of opportunity.

Teams…

Discussion defined the four teams that make up the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network:

• the Exec Team looks after organisational matters like policy, finances and governance
• the Membership Team is focused on managing that aspect of the organisation, especially now that the Network is introducing paid membership
• a Research Team is investigating the possibility of offering insurance to community gardens as part of membership
• the Communications Team looks after the website, social media, eNews and other communications business.

The people who make up the Australian City Farms & Commuity Gardens Network enact their values through the organisation. These values are pro-community, pro-democracy, pro-good food and pro-people's freedom to control their choice of the foods they want.

These values are pro-community, pro-democracy, pro-good food and pro-people's freedom to control their choice of the foods they want

The Network connects people to place and community through a philosophy and literature based on citizen food production and shared management of public and private land, along with the Network's promotion of community food systems and their benefits to creating resilient communities and cities.

The Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network is powered by people's passion and experienced, their knowledgable and enthusiasm about their work.

Connecting and sharing ideas through the Network's website and social media, at national and regional gatherings and through its online, downloadable fact sheets and ebooks, the Network's role in assisting new and established community gardens and city farms, as well as local government and researchers, has been acknowledged many times.

Potential awaits…

The gathering agreed that there is great potential for the Network to expand its existing role as an umbrella organisation for community gardening and related community food strategies in Australia. It has an existing base of knowledge and skills that could be built on, and a demonstrated capacity for education and advocacy.

Some of the potentials the gathering identified include:

• improving our engagement in education and advocacy
• creation of a national database of community gardens listing as many gardens and similar community enterprises as possible (a national community garden mapping system is currently being developed)
• as community-based urban agriculturists, to share our stories, make connections and create a sense of community
• to increase collaboration by local, allied organisations in regional gatherings
• to increase the involvement in the Network of people already engaged in community gardening and community food systems; to become economically viable, partly through introducing membership fees and benefits
• through the Network's social media, to link with other relevant groups and websites
• recognition of the Network and its role and potential among local government, environmental organisations and others
• to assist in building optimism and resilience.

Scenes from a gathering…

the Australian City Farms & community Gardens Network connects, educates and advocates for community gardens, city farms and other citizen food initiatives…