Seeing the Food Forest Through the Trees

We are very pleased to be publishing our first Research Report!

Seeing the Food Forest Through the Trees: Community Indicators for Regenerative Circularity is fruit of the collaboration between The Food Forest, The Alliance for Praxis Research and Kensington Circular Economy Precinct Community Group (KCEPCG).

The Food Forest / Living on Wurundjeri Country and located within the interstitial green spaces of the Kensington Public Housing estates on Derby Street, this is an ecological oasis established in 2017. Since then, housing estate residents and the wider community alike have shared and enjoyed its local food production, forest growth, compost access, care responsibilities, and leisure offerings.

The Kensington Circular Economy Precinct Community Group (KCEPCG) / is a community collaboration of residents of Kensington, Transition Town Kensington, Urban Farm Collective, Kensington Neighbourhood House, Unison, Kensington Town Hall Compost Hub, plus supporters The Venny, Kensington Community Children’s Co-operative (KCCC), and Kensington Community High School (KCH).

APR has been working closely to the community for a year now, prompted by the idea of visibilising the invisible:

How can such a small space catalyst so much social, environmental and economical transformation? How can that transformation be translated into research?

The community, via a partnership with City of Melbourne, were already tracking the amount of materials diverted from landfill and how many new circular initiatives were put in place in Kensington.

However, the community and APR perceived that evaluations alone did not go far enough toward capturing, understanding, and articulating the multiple ways in which diverse and existing circular initiatives impact the human, more-than-human, and community as a whole.

This research therefore seeks to identify, capture, and present the multiple (and harder-to-discern) community values nurtured by Kensington’s regenerative food and waste initiatives, specifically through the Food Forest.

“It'd be amazing to be able to measure that - I don't know how you can do it - but the way people move through the space or what effect that has on them, you know? Like I feel when I’m here. How do you measure that? To what effect does that have? Because there’s research already on forests but (...) to think of it in terms of the space that was here before the [Food] Forest compared to what it gives to the community now. It's a very different space to walk through.” (Focus Group Workshop on April 13, 2024).

We created ten indicators based on the community’s existing knowledge and understanding of their work in regenerative circularity and the things that they were most curious to learn more about. Each indicator includes metrics of interest for what we wanted to know, methods for how to capture these interests in the Food Forest, guiding questions that drove our research approach, and connection to goals of the SDGs and the Melbourne Doughnut.

You can read the e-book here or download the PDF below.

(Long Version) (Final) Seeing the Food Forest Through the Trees - with cover - Digital ISB.

Download • 7.69MB

This work is intended to be used beyond the Food Forest as such an approach could be applied to many grassroots initiatives. However, it requires the same intensive approach to place and people that we have sought here. Kensington has already been creating momentum for circular economies through the regenerative and community-focused initiatives of the Food Forest, Fresh Food Market, Compost Network, and Repair Hub. Our work has been to listen and then to project, working directly with the community to create our approach.

I hope you enjoy the material! We are open to feedback and we designed this to be a ever-evolving collection of indicators - so if you have ideas on how to use them, please get in contact.

Soon we'll be announcing a couple of events to discuss the material. Keep an eye on our blog posts!