After a year of reaching out to the public and conducting interviews, Cowichan Green Community (CGC) recently celebrated the official launch of their Sharing Our Seed Stories project.
Sharing Our Seed Stories is comprised of six videos, now available to view online, featuring interviews with residents from the Cowichan Valley and beyond, from Cedar to Mill Bay, speaking about seed saving. Many of those interviewed were seniors and First Nations elders, who shared their experiences with saving the seeds of both agricultural and wild plants, their introductions to the activity, how they learned about seed saving, why they do it and what impact it has on the community.
“All of them are very unique,” Vanessa Goodall, a spokesperson for CGC who also edited the videos, said. “We were able to gather a lot of different perspectives on saving seeds.”
The project started over a year ago, with funding from Service Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors Program, as a means of engaging seniors and elders involved with seed saving and making this information available to a new generation of potential seed savers.
“Our primary goal is to encourage more people to save seeds,” Goodall said. “There’s a decline in seed saving in this country and within the Cowichan Valley. We’ve lost this tradition and the knowledge that goes with it. We hope that sharing these stories can inspire people to keep saving seeds.”
Goodall said that CGC is now entering the promotional phase of the project, and are trying to make the project known to residents of Lake Cowichan and the Cowichan Valley through social media and the group’s newsletter. Though the primary focus of the project is to engage seniors through seed saving, Goodall expressed confidence in the power of social media to promote the stories.
All six videos included in Sharing Our Seed Stories can be found on CGC’s website (www.cowichangreencommunity.org) and on Youtube.
