By Mary Adams, AWC The Hague
2023 Region 4 Meeting
AWC Amsterdam
Making Grassroots Effort Blossom
Goatfarm Ridammerhoeve in the Amsterdam Forest
AWC Amsterdam was the host of the FAWCO Region 4 meeting in November 2023. After opening remarks from FAWCO and The FAWCO Foundation, Peninah Musyimi, founder and director of Safe Spaces Nairobi, took the stage to share her personal journey and talk about the Awesome Blossoms social enterprise project, which FAWCO is supporting as our 2023‒2025 Target Project.
Creating a Safe Place to Learn
Enduring a childhood in the slums and trying to unlock the promise of education was a harsh existence for Peninah. Drawing on her determination to believe in herself and make her dreams come true, she escaped the slums and became a lawyer. However, she soon realized the real social change was not advocating for human rights for individual girls. It was empowering 10,000 girls in the slums to raise their voices in unity. Peninah founded Safe Spaces in 2008, with three girls who wanted to learn how to get out of the slums. Now there are 7,000 girls in the program, which is supported by a network of private and institutional donors.
Safe Spaces is about creating visibility for girls, building self-confidence and most importantly, developing peer education techniques. That means that as girls pass through the Safe Spaces education system, they become mentors to younger students. This enables each girl to be a role model with the credo: each one, teach one. Peninah has 47 girls involved in basketball/baseball to ensure sports scholarships for continuing education. In addition to teaching computer literacy, she thinks outside the box and offers female skills development in auto mechanics, photography and film. Life skills include important information on human rights, reproductive health and domestic violence.
Investing to Sustain Safe Spaces
As director of Safe Spaces, Peninah realized that she needed to generate funding to expand her community outreach and increase school participation. Although she had sponsors and donors, she focused her attention on the rooftops of the Mathare Valley slums. What did families need for a healthier life? Her goal was to find “a solution within their reach.” With the severe shortage of water and land, she decided to focus on vegetable urban farming. The Awesome Blossoms fundraising concept serves a dual interest as both a commercial and a social enterprise. During a panel discussion with two partners, Climate Circle and Both Ends, we learned how Awesome Blossoms budded and bloomed.
To develop the technology of urban farming, Peninah worked with Climate Circle, a group that finds investors to fund scalable business models tackling climate issues. Panelist Saskia Reus-Makkink described working with investors such as Hydroponics Africa to foster innovative, low-cost hydroponics equipment and perform testing through a series of pilot projects. Panelist Cindy Coltman, Senior Policy Officer at Both ENDS, acts as an advocate on climate justice to stimulate dialogue between stakeholders and promote sustainable local alternatives. Her insights included focusing on root issues for problem resolution. Both panelists agreed that to make any vision a sustainable reality, a critical success factor was to engage with key resources within the community in the project. This tactic ensures a larger impact on the local economy and creates local champions for change.
Sowing the Seeds
Allan C’oredo, Implementation Project Manager of Awesome Blossoms, described the need for a “doable and workable hydroponic model in an informal settlement.” Pilot testing led to the successful execution of a pipeline system using less water and providing 45-day crop rotations of 7 tons of vegetables. The partnership implementation model includes investors, three primary schools and local government. This is based on a win/win scenario premise. The funding from the FAWCO Target Project includes the installation of 1,500 urban gardens at three primary schools. The schools have clean water and walled boundaries with security that ensures no crop interference. The schools receive one third of the crops growing within their walls as food for students. Another third of the farming space is claimed by 75 women. They have formed three groups that act as a commercial growing coalition. This includes a Center of Expertise with classes on agriculture, financial literacy and “table banking” to stimulate healthy competition in the local market. Table banking is a group-based funding system where members of a group meet weekly and contribute their savings to form a kitty from which members can borrow. The sale of the final third of the crops generates revenue for Safe Spaces to ensure the continuation of education and fostering “gender partnership” within the community.
Sharing Local Perspectives
For the second part of the agenda, AWC Amsterdam raised our awareness about climate action groups in the Netherlands. FAWCO Rep Madeline Hendricks moderated a session with Taste Before You Waste, a non-profit group with a mission to reduce consumer food waste and a unique learning community called De Kaskantine.
Wingston Sharon, chair of Taste Before You Waste, described his partnerships with local greengrocers to donate leftover fresh produce. The organization uses the food to host donation-based events such as foodcycle markets, Wasteless Wednesday dinners, educational workshops, event catering and presentations. Essentially, Taste Before You Waste acts as a social showcase to prove that food regarded as waste is actually delicious and valuable.
Christine Finke is Sustainability Educator at De Kaskantine, an off-grid organization dedicated to community-based climate action. This group has developed a traveling model (eleven shipping containers and two greenhouses) to create spaces for people to meet, grow, eat and collaborate. From urban gardening, composting, and plant-based cooking to saving and redistributing food waste and producing renewable energy, De Kaskantine offers a wide range of opportunities for hands-on community learning.
Madeline asked the panel about challenges and opportunities they faced in engaging with local communities. A key issue is dealing with the aftermath of COVID-19, which has drastically reduced cash flow and volunteer participation. Opportunities in the Netherlands include more interest in sustainability tracking through maex.nl and acceptance of the “doughnut economy.” Doughnut economics embodies the importance of understanding and respecting the limits of the planet’s resources so people and the environment can thrive. Both organizations agreed that food waste can only be resolved by engaging with government and large food corporations to practice and enforce doughnut economics in social reform programs.
Meeting Wrap-Up
Peninah and Allan were available the entire day for conversations. The group also had plenty of time to talk with each other, shop at The FAWCO Foundation pop-up boutique and explore the farm’s population of goats, lambs, chickens, pigs, cows, and horses. The final exercise of the day was the World Café facilitated by change management consultant Leslie Janoe. This interactive workshop invited participants to share their experiences working with grassroots organizations. It is through these types of sessions that FAWCO members connect, motivate, and inspire each other with their real-world experiences: successes, failures, lessons learned and most importantly, using the FAWCO framework of global teams and projects to shape both our own communities and women and girls in need in the world.
As the afternoon passed and I talked with guests and colleagues, I couldn’t help but watch and enjoy the antics of the goats at the farm. As author Sue Grafton once commented, “Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of those ideas that really separate the sheep from the goats.” AWC Amsterdam’s idea to focus their agenda on the environment and their sponsorship of Awesome Blossoms proved that good ideas come to fruition in the most amazing ways when we act together to make grassroots efforts blossom.