This month, Cowichan Green Community announced that long-time executive director Judy Stafford will step down from the position and be replaced by Vanessa Daether in May.
Stafford has been with the non-profit for 17 years, watching it grow from a small group of food security advocates into a social enterprise that touches the lives of countless people in the Cowichan Valley. She oversaw the creation of the Food Recovery Program, the Cowichan Grown Farm, Food and Drink Map, the construction of the Cowichan Farm and Food Hub and the reFresh Marketplace in downtown Duncan.
Stafford said she has mixed feelings about her retirement from Cowichan Green Community, but also noted that being executive director is “a lot of work.” Now, with five grandchildren, she’s looking to slow down.
“I always thought when I’ve, you know, worked myself out of a job because everybody’s got food on the table, then we’re done,” she said.
“It’s the right time. My intuition says that it’s time. Sometimes you can be in a job too long, so I think it’s time for some new ideas,” she said.
But Stafford isn’t cutting ties completely. She will stay on to help the incoming executive director get settled into the role and says she’ll “keep her foot in the door” to continue writing grants for Cowichan Green Community.
A job that ‘kept rolling‘
When Stafford took on a six month contract in 2007 to write a few articles for a small food advocacy group in Duncan she didn’t expect to still be working there, let alone leading the organization, years later. Stafford, who had recently moved to the Island from Ontario, had already been freelance writing for magazines as a way to transition her career away from finance, a sector she had been working for 25 years.
At the time, Cowichan Green Community was taking out full-page advertisements in local papers to encourage the public to grow food in their backyard and donate it to food banks.
That’s also when the founder of Cowichan Green Community left suddenly, leaving the small organization at a crossroads.
“The general consensus was they were just going to fold the organization since there was only one other person working there. So I said, ‘What would it take to keep it going?’” Stafford said in an interview with The Discourse.
Before she knew it, writing one grant to keep the organization going turned into another and the “job kept rolling” for another 17 years, Stafford said.
One initiative that Stafford is particularly proud of is the Food Recovery Program which takes produce that would otherwise be thrown away by grocery stores and distributes it to be used by service providers, schools and the reFRESH Cowichan Marketplace. To date the program has recovered 816,466 kilograms of food.
“When we first came up with the idea for it we couldn’t get anybody to fund it,” she said. In total, it took seven years for the Cowichan Green Community to find funding for the Food Recovery Program, which is still running today after launching in 2018.
Stafford said her vision for Cowichan Green Community has always been to make sure projects are sustainable without one-off funding from the government. She points to the Cowichan Grown Farm and Food Map, which started off as a one year project and now pays for itself through advertising year after year.
Other projects such as the Food Hub — a 418-square-metre food processing warehouse that will open soon on Beverly Street — have seen “daunting” cost overruns and have been difficult to get off the ground, according to Stafford.
“I wanted that to be open before I stepped away,” she said.
Changing landscape for non-profits post-pandemic
Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Stafford said there were many positives for Cowichan Green Community. Food security was top of mind when people couldn’t go to grocery stores or find what they needed in them, and the federal government was more willing than ever to allocate funding to non-profits supporting local food initiatives. It was a time when Cowichan Green Community became essential, even ramping up operations while other organizations shut down.
Stafford said that now, the majority of pandemic funding has dried up and grants that were previously available through the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction are gone or have been scaled back.
She said this lack of funding for food security is all too normal, and has been even before the pandemic.
“The grant landscape has changed so much in my 17 years. The Ministry of Social Development was right down the street and I would just walk over and talk to them. Now you deal with people all over the province and there’s no awareness of the impact that the funding has in the community directly,” she said.
Unlike most non-profits, Cowichan Green Community doesn’t have a “contribution agreement” with the government which means they don’t receive ongoing funding. Stafford said this is likely because food security is a relatively new concept and doesn’t have a specific ministry associated with it.
“There is a Ministry of Agriculture and Food and they do a little bit and sometimes we fall under the Ministry of Health but there really isn’t a minister of food security, which is what I would love to see and have dedicated resources attached to all the food,” she said.
With a new incoming minister of agriculture, Stafford is hopeful that the ministry will shift focus to local food systems and producers rather than food exports. She also said she thinks incoming executive director Vanessa Daether will help step things up for Cowichan Green Community.
“I think she’s [Daether] got the young energy that’s needed to get us to the next level because I think things are so cyclical. I think it’s going to be a couple more hard years of funding,” Stafford said.
A familiar face comes to Cowichan Green Community
Daether said her return to Cowichan Green Community is a homecoming of sorts since she worked there from 2011 to 2016 as a coordinator developing seed-saving educational workshops.
“To come back in a leadership capacity is just really an honour. I don’t think there’s another way I could express how grateful I am to be returning to an organization that, for a long time, felt like home,” she said in an interview with The Discourse.
Daether has worked across Canada with agricultural, food security and seed-saving organizations to better understand food-systems through community projects and sustainable practices.
After departing in 2016, Daether pursued a doctorate of social science where she studied methods for measuring the impact of food-based initiatives on communities. This brought her back to the Cowichan Valley to research the work being done at Cowichan Green Community.
Sometimes that research can sit on a shelf or “doesn’t grow legs,” she said, but now in this new role, she hopes to apply what she learned in the real world.
Daether said she’s been really lucky to have the opportunity to work with non-profits and businesses to understand the challenges they both face. She hopes that understanding will open more doors for farmers and local businesses to work and collaborate with Cowichan Green Community.
A news release from Cowichan Green Community says Daether has a “deep understanding of food systems” and that “her passion for collaborative solutions make her uniquely qualified to lead Cowichan Green Community into its next chapter.”
Food insecurity is a growing concern across the country and uncertainty in Canada-U.S. trade relations could further impact food prices, Daether said, which puts pressure on everyone. To her, balancing the needs of the community with the needs of food producers is a large piece of addressing food insecurity, which continues to get worse.
“I think it’s easy to get into a dark place when you look at the state of food access or food inequity,” Daether said.
There isn’t a “magical answer” to solve food insecurity but collaboration, making human connections in the community and maintaining the legacy that Stafford is leaving behind are top of mind for Daether as she steps into her new role.
It’s early days for Daether, who couldn’t share too much about future plans for Cowichan Green Community, but she said in the coming weeks she will be focused on meeting the team and settling into the role before Stafford leaves in May.
