Vision

Cultivating Place

The vision for the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm is encompassed in Cultivating Place, a strategic academic plan. Authored by the South Campus Academic Planning Committee in 2010, Cultivating Place integrates with UBC’s Sustainability Academic Strategy (pdf) and, honouring the farm’s place on traditional Musqueam territory, UBC’s Aboriginal Strategic Plan. It arose from the UBC Board of Governors’ December 2008 directive to develop an “academically rigorous and globally significant” plan for the 24-ha area on UBC’s South Campus addressing issues of sustainability. The document is available for downloading publicly online.

Vision

The UBC Farm and surrounding areas on South Campus will be a world-class academic resource and a central part of UBC’s sustainability aspirations, enabling UBC to explore and exemplify new globally significant paradigms for the design and function of sustainable communities and their ecological support systems.

Mission

To enable UBC to be a global leader in the creation of new patterns for sustainable and healthy communities integrated with their surrounding ecology, through exemplary, academically rigorous research, through transformative learning, through innovative cross-faculty and interdisciplinary collaboration, through socially responsible community engagement, and through international dialogue and knowledge-dissemination.

Guiding Principles

To implement this vision and mission, Cultivating Place is committed to creating an innovative living laboratory and a crucible for social change on South Campus. Within these cross-cutting themes, this initiative will:

A Living Laboratory

• Strive to demonstrate ways of understanding society’s reliance on ecological systems as well as ways of enhancing this relationship while promoting cultural and biological diversity, regeneration and resilience, and improving land productivity and stewardship practices;
• Develop global best practices in the full range of ecosystem services, from provision (food, fibre, fuel, habitat, etc.) through end-product (waste, greenhouse gas) transformation and storage;

An Agent of Social Change

• Cultivate knowledge in every aspect of sustainable practice and use that knowledge to enrich the UBC academic experience and to build sustainability literacy, locally, regionally and globally;
• Provide an academically rigorous and environmentally healthy venue for inquiry and the intellectual space to share different ways of knowing, and, through activities physically rooted on South Campus, create and disseminate models for social engagement that generate innovation and that build bridges across perspectives, generations, and cultures;
• Collaborate with community partners, governments, and other institutions in exploring and defining global best practices to support healthy and sustainable living.