Helping Urban Food Commons Navigate Change

Our Mission

We are supporting an urban food and community garden in Vancouver as it faces an uncertain future. This project will help the garden community slow down, gather what the garden has taught, map the relationships around it, and create practical tools that other community gardens can adapt when land tenure becomes uncertain.

At its simplest, this work is about listening to a place before decisions overtake it. It gives the garden community time, care, and shared attention so the next step can be held with more honesty and support.

Background and Challenge

Urban land rarely gets to become something alive. The coFood Collaborative Garden did.

For years, this garden has been quietly doing what many cities need more of, regenerating depleted soil, growing food that feeds neighbours, and bringing people together around the act of caring for a shared place. It is agriculture as neighbourhood infrastructure. It is stewardship learned season by season. It is a community that chose, again and again, to show up.

The coFood garden at 4th Avenue and Scotia Street is an urban food and community commons in the heart of Vancouver. It is a place where soil, compost, plants, neighbours, shared meals, learning, and community care come together on land that might otherwise be treated only as real estate. The garden sits on private property stewarded for public use with permission from the owners. Stewarded in its present form since 2017, coFood fosters outstanding biodiversity on a small footprint, growing more than 67 perennial and annual plants with many intentionally cultivated Indigenous species, including nootka rose, salmonberry, thimbleberry, and salal.

The garden is designed with permaculture principles in mind and has seating for up to 30 people at a time, with 14 seats always available. It hosts upwards of two dozen visitors daily, hundreds each week, along with crows, robins, hummingbirds, and other more-than-human denizens. A community of 10 to 20 volunteers plant, water, maintain, and harvest the crops, with weekly garden work parties that welcome neighbours, new volunteers, and people learning to work with the soil.

This garden is also an active experiment in how land-based food commons can become hubs for culture and resilience. Above and beneath the plants and gathering places, the garden composts on site and, in 2026, is constructing East Vancouver’s only compost demonstration site to support soil-building education. coFood hosts a community fridge in partnership with Vancouver’s Food Mesh nonprofit, provides free wifi in collaboration with a neighbour, and hosts a mesh radio repeater node in the local Salish Sea MeshCore network.

Over the years, the garden has brought people together for Music in the Garden events, emergency preparedness workshops, Back Alley Cinema open-sky neighbourhood movies, long-table dinners, potlucks, engagement parties, birthdays, and everyday neighbourly care. The garden serves as a model for growing food, soil, and community, literally at grass roots.

The garden’s future is uncertain because the land is privately held and facing financial and development pressures that may force change as soon as 2027. The situation is complex, and the community is still learning what continuation, transition, or stewardship pathways may be possible. The timing matters because the land situation may change before there is a clear community pathway for continuation, meaningful hospicing, or careful transition.

Our Approach

We are not coming to this work with a fixed answer. We are coming with a question. What does it take for a community to respond well when a loved urban garden faces an uncertain future?

This project is part of Regenerate Cascadia’s Landscape Hub Cultivator, through which the Fraser Lowland Landscape Group is learning how to carry community mapping into local stewardship, regeneration strategy, and funding ecosystem development.

In Phase 2, the Fraser Lowland Landscape Group is preparing Metachrysalis and bioregional mapping workshops with garden co-founder Emily McGill and coFood Vancouver. Metachrysalis is a facilitated game-based process for exploring change. Bioregional mapping helps a community see how one place is connected to the wider living landscape around it, including food, water, soil, species, people, history, and care. It is a participatory way of mapping place through local knowledge, ecological relationships, cultural memory, and lived experience, so the community can see what conventional maps often leave out.

These workshops will begin by listening to the garden itself, the people who care for it, and the wider relationships around it. What does this garden make possible? Who is connected to it? What forms of nourishment, learning, biodiversity, belonging, compost, soil care, and community resilience live here? What would be lost if it disappeared entirely? What pathways might exist for continuation, transition, community support, or shared learning? What local connections or gardens are missing who might be able, at minimum, to adopt perennials or learn from coFood’s path?

The Phase 2 workshops will give us the raw material for Phase 3, including maps, stories, relationship patterns, community questions, and early stewardship pathways. This Ma Earth project will help turn that material into a practical next step.

What the Funds Will Support

Funding will support the people, gatherings, documentation, relationship mapping, Indigenous Knowledge Holder participation, public storytelling, and readiness work needed to carry the Phase 2 workshop harvest into Phase 3.

Funds will support facilitation, three Stewardship Circle sessions, garden documentation, community conversations, photo and story gathering, synthesis of workshop materials, Indigenous Knowledge Holder honoraria and protocol support, a stewardship and transition pathway scan, public updates, and the creation of a learning package that other gardens can adapt.

This grant will not purchase land or cover owner carrying costs. It will support community stewardship work that creates shared learning beyond this one garden. Funds will help the community understand what is at stake, what support is needed, who needs to be in the conversation, and what options may be worth exploring before decisions are made.

All funds will route through the Regenerate Cascadia / Department of Bioregion Ma Earth organization account. No grant funds will be paid to coFood, ThePivot.Earth, property owners, or personal accounts. Any payments to Marianne or Melanie will be for services rendered as Fraser Lowland Landscape Stewards or approved contractors through RC / DOB processes.

What We Will Create

Over six months, this project will create a clear, consent-based record of what the coFood garden makes possible, who needs to be involved, and what practical next steps are available to coFood and its allies.

Convene three Fraser Lowland Stewardship Circle sessions.
Document the garden through storytelling, conversations, photos, and workshop harvest materials.
Create one garden stewardship and land tenure resilience learning package that coFood and other urban food commons can adapt.
Create one relationship and support map showing who needs to be involved next.
Prepare one stewardship and transition pathway scan focused on public learning, community support, and transferable lessons.
Publish at least three public updates through the Department of Bioregion, Regenerate Cascadia’s Ma Earth organization profile, coFood’s current social media channels, and the coFood website.
Create a simple template set that other urban gardens can adapt when land tenure becomes uncertain.

The Stewardship Circle will be made up of people connected to land, food, water, ecology, community, local knowledge, and urban food resilience. The circle will review what emerges from the coFood mapping process, identify who is missing, name what needs care, and help shape practical next steps. It will also begin clarifying the shared agreements, roles, and decision-making practices needed to carry the work responsibly, especially if future stewardship, community support, or transition pathways become possible.

Across three sessions, the circle will move from listening to action. The first session will review the workshop harvest, name what the garden makes possible, and identify missing voices. The second session will map support relationships, stewardship needs, and possible community pathways for continuing the garden’s public value, carrying plants and learning elsewhere, or supporting a careful transition. The third session will clarify next-step roles, shared agreements, decision points, and what is needed to carry the work forward responsibly.

By the end of the project, we will have completed three Stewardship Circle sessions, one relationship map, one stewardship and transition pathway scan, one shared learning package, one template set for other gardens, and at least three public updates.

Shared Learning Beyond This Garden

The coFood garden is one small place where many larger questions meet. How do we care for food-growing spaces in a city where land is expensive, housing pressure is real, and community gardens often depend on fragile land arrangements? At 4th and Scotia, these questions are being felt through the future of one garden, the people who steward it, and the community relationships that have grown around it.

This work will support coFood stewards, neighbours, volunteers, and community members by gathering shared knowledge, clarifying next steps, and creating materials that can be held collectively. It will also support other urban growers and food commons organisers in Vancouver and British Columbia who may face similar land tenure uncertainty.

Together, the outputs will form a public learning package on land tenure resilience for urban food commons, using the coFood garden as a living case study. Regenerate Cascadia will share what is learned with other Landscape Groups across Cascadia.

By the end of the project, coFood and its allies will have a clearer picture of what the garden makes possible, who needs to be involved, what support is needed, and which continuation, transition, community support, or shared learning pathways may be worth exploring. Other gardens will have a simple set of templates they can adapt when facing similar uncertainty.

This project is about slowing down enough to listen to a place before decisions overtake it. It gives the garden community time, care, and shared attention so the next step can be taken with imagination, honesty, and community around it.