Hastings Folk Garden Sound Map

Hastings Folk Garden (HFG) is a mature community garden that is cared for daily by members and residents of the DTES Community.  It has provided space for access to nature and connection to the community through this pandemic, heat waves and intersecting crises. Through all of this, HFG is thriving: It is home to a traditional sweat lodge, a therapeutic apiary, a medicinal pollinator garden, cultural projects and memorial, trees, hummingbirds, a red-tailed hawk & many native bees. 

Sound Map is a proposed resistance project centered on the Hastings Folk Garden that weaves together three iterative, low-barrier projects that the Hives for Humanity (H4H) Community Engagement Committee (CEC) collaboratively co-created over the past year of organizing together. The projects build on themes that emerged from monthly meetings (Gardens of Care, Grow Your Own Medicine and Listening Slow) that question how we can individually and collectively take steps on the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action while pursuing impactful feedback on how to improve overall program accessibility and relevance.  This process of embodying reconciliation takes its lead from our Indigenous members, amplifying the work that has been done to date on empowering informed consent and ethical research.

During this time, the CEC also developed a toolkit for community-engaged governance that we would like to action in smaller goals. With the support of the SFU Student-Community Engagement Competition, we propose to resource our governance principle 'Room to Grow' by supporting a CEC member in receiving dignified lateral mentorship to embody and build a seasonal monitoring framework for the Sound Map project.  We intend to use this to inform the H4H board of directors on what is working in community and how we might continue to resist extraction with greater intention.  We are calling this element of the project a Bloom Calendar.

Community partners:

Hives for Humanity (H4H)