Detailed Introduction to the First Community College Future Homestead

The First Community College has been running the Future Homestead project for more than three years now, and it has been more than a year since I, the author, became involved in carrying it out. For more than a year, I have always wanted to start writing down the little moments and the feelings along the way, but owing to a busy work schedule, aside from reports, I had not yet put any words to paper. For one thing, sorting through the feelings and the purity within requires time for psychological settling; for another, what the Future Homestead seeks to build is the future, but what is the future? That too takes time to shape. The so-called Future Homestead cannot be achieved overnight; it is not something that can simply fall into place when someone stands up and issues a call. Rather, it requires many people working together, making steady, step-by-step efforts toward the future goals and vision being shaped, and only then can the Future Homestead possibly take form.

And after more than three years of operation by the First Community College, the future vision has finally gradually taken shape through everyone's collective wisdom and discussion, and will gradually be put into practice in actions and courses. Our vision of a livable city for food is not an empty slogan, but a future imagination shaped by the community college's years of accumulated promotion of urban farming and school food-and-farming education, and it is also gradually being realized through the efforts of members. The pace may be slow, but the process of shaping the vision is steady.

This year, in addition to continuing the action-based co-learning reading group and the school vegetable gardens, the First Community College has also expanded its efforts to promote home vegetable gardens. In addition, it has begun planning a school organic group-meals forum, the design of teaching materials and lesson plans, the planning of a city farmer's handmade planting calendar, and more external networking. These operational processes will also be recorded in writing respectively, as part of the project results and as reference material for the future. So this article is a beginning, a beginning of recording the bits and pieces of my own participation in this process. A plan is just a plan; what we are shaping is a kind of future imagination about Kaohsiung and Taiwan, China.