The County Food Hub steering committee co-chairs Mike Farrell (left) and Todd Foster presented the plan for a food-based kitchen project at Sophiasburgh Central School Wednesday night (14th) at the Demorestville Town Hall. Photo by Olivia Timm, QNet News.
By Rachel Bell [1]
BELLEVILLE – A community food hub at Sophiasburg Central School [2] in Prince Edward County will allow the small school to stay open.
The food hub is a multi-faceted idea built around a shared use commercial kitchen [3]available for rental by businesses and community groups.
Mike Farrell, co-chair of the steering committee for the County Food Hub says the shared commercial kitchen provides restaurant quality equipment to help rentals get started.
“Let’s say you’re planning to open up a taco cart in the summer months to satisfy the tourists and you need to prep and you kind of need to get out of your kitchen doing that, you can use our kitchen, store all your gear there, pay a minimum for some storage as well as a freezer, or a fridge, and then prepare all your ingredients, bring them in your cart, load them up and go wherever you’re doing it,” he said.
Farrell says locating the food hub at the school is a win-win, for both the business and the school.
“The idea is we keep our business going, but we also are going to be tenants to the landlord of the board, and what we pay them will help cover and mitigate, if not completely eradicate costs for the school for annual upkeep,” he said.
Paula Leite, a mother of a student at Sophiasburgh says she is happy the school won’t be closing its doors.
“I feel pretty good about it. It’s right for the kids to have their school where they live. Having a 4 or 5 year old spend one hour on the bus isn’t realistic,” she said.
Letite also said she believes having a school in the community gives kids a sense of belonging.
“The community hub will allow residents to keep local. As a mother, we feel pretty good that this may happen. We’re excited to have something different for our kids. There is no place for a community kitchen that could also be an incubator to help businesses grow,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential. As a mom and community member, there’s a lot of good things that can come out of it … The support of everyone around is essential.”
Farrell agrees, that there are many good things to come from the commercial kitchen.
“There’s economic development of course, there’s also educational development, we intend to work with the board, the board is interested in curriculum and enhanced learning around nutrition, growing things, preparing things, even entrepreneurialism as they see different businesses that are actually operating in our unit there.”
Farrell says the students at Sophiasburg Central School will also benefit.
“We want them to start getting enhanced curriculum around what food is,” he said. “It’s funny, out in rural area sometimes, kids don’t know the difference between potatoes and turnips. We want to teach them that, get them involved, so start understanding there’s a future beyond moving out of the county, and you can stay here and actually get involved in agriculture, and do stuff in restaurants…show them all the interesting businesses that are out here in the county and the Bay of Quinte Region in general.”
Not only will the shared commercial kitchen bring in opportunities and save the school from closing; it will also save the community Farrell said.
“Whenever I speak about this I always say it started out as sort of saving the school, but then it’s kind of quickly turned into saving a community because we’re a little further out there, and we actually have a number of villages that are operating still here, North Port, [4] Demorestville, [5] in particular, even Green Point [6],” he said. “So you know you take the one central school out of there, bus everybody away, your’e not gonna draw too many families into the ward, and next thing you know it’s something different.”