Costruendo Ruralopoli

Summary of the project

Ruralopoli is a box where the sustainable production can live together with the capacity building and the awareness raising on the topics related to the SDGs 12 and 13.The project aims at designing a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), which includes all the previous experiences and focuses on the interaction with the territory and its citizens to be proactive. Thi idea stems from the involvement of Slow Food with other organisations in building models for sustainable production and consumption. The CSA works as a management model where the producsts are environmental friendly thanks to the gained awarenees of the community who lives there. The farmers involved already use techniques for soil regeneration and innovative seeds to answer to the challenges linked to climate change. These activities will be coupled with the energy cycle to set up a system that uses the waste of the agronomic cycle and becomes self sufficient.

Beneficiaries

• 9.800 inhabitants in Brescia town (5% of the total population)

Overall achievements

It took time for the virtual consensus to become action and subscription: in the consumers as well as in the producers we encountered a slow motion. Due to Covid, it has been decided to organise a series of web interviews to some people who can discuss coherently thematic areas in line with our aims. This series of 15 interviews, called “Ruralive”, went on all social media channels. They were conversations with people who have experience, expertise and ideas and helped to build up the Community Sustained Agriculture (CSA), raising awareness in people about “Costruendo Ruralopoli” and getting them involved in building the CSA. It has been delivered a survey among the people interested in the activities, aimed to know their food habits, in order to identify the distribution of main diets (omnivorous, vegetarian, vegan); It has been delivered 100 boxes with the CSA products to 100 families. In order to prepare the boxes, we chose 7 producers whose activities are characterised by environmental and production sustainability, as well as agroecological innovation, consistently with the Green Deal and Farm to Fork Programmes. This was a real and reproducible action to translate into practice our efforts; in fact, we built a path of knowledge and awareness aimed to tell that the most effective way to battle the climatic, sanitary, ecological, and economic emergencies in a territory that is redesigning the relationships controlling food production, distribution, consumption. Food consumption must go hand in hand with awareness in dietary choice, taking into consideration health and climate.