Food: because having access to food is a right, not a privilege
The Fundació Ferrer Sustainability was founded as a response to a food emergency detected in our community and aggravated by COVID-19
Its aim is to transform lives and work towards a more equitable and fairer society, with a vision of a green, healthy, inclusive and cohesive city, based on three strategic pillars:
Social cohesion
Economic progress
Environmental conservation
The current projects of the Ferrer Sustainability Foundation are:
Green for good
Green for Good is a social urban gardening project aimed at making the cities that make up the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona greener, as well as more sustainable, inclusive and productive, by establishing social gardens managed by groups in vulnerable situations in the cities and their surrounding areas.
Our aim is to transform a total of 10 hectares of land in Barcelona and its surrounding metropolitan area into productive, green areas, focusing on what is most important: the transformative power of the gardens in the lives of the people who manage them and also of the people who benefit from the food they produce.
Figures for 2022
21 tonnes of product harvested
– 3 tonnes of high quality organic fruit and vegetables from the Green For Good vegetable garden (Barcelona).
– 18 tonnes from the Sant Pol de Mar vegetable garden.
During the Days for Good, 125 volunteers were involved in different tasks, such as planting seedlings, harvesting the crops, preparing the plots for gardening, etc.
More than 700 kg of vegetables (sweet potatoes, aubergines, peppers, maize, courgettes and cucumbers) were harvested during the Days for Good, and 80 potting trays were prepared for 1600 future vegetable plants.
Ferrer for Food
Ferrer for Food is a social kitchen project located in Vilassar de Dalt, where nutritionally complete menus are delivered daily to social organisations, soup kitchens and parishes, with the aim of offering top quality food and thus contributing to a dignified and healthy diet for the people who need it most.
Vegetables from the Ferrer Sustainability Foundation’s two vegetable gardens are used to prepare the meals.
Our goal: to deliver one million meals a year, to achieve one million smiles
This means achieving an average of 4,000 meals per day, a figure we managed to reach by September 2022 and that we are committed to maintaining over the entire course of the project.
We have two of the Foundation’s own gardens where we grow vegetables and fruit in permaculture, which supply the Ferrer for Food social kitchen, at two main sites: the Rubió i Tudurí edible garden in Torre de Santa Caterina (Pedralbes), where we cultivate an area of 4,000m² and our eco-industrial and mass-production vegetable garden in Vall de Golinons (Sant Pol de Mar), which has an area of 13,000m².
Both are permaculture farms where we practice regenerative agriculture, which allows us to take a clean, respectful, ecological and sustainable approach to the production of vegetables.
In our garden in Barcelona we have set ourselves two challenges for the future:
Promote a greener, more sustainable and agro-ecological city model.
Set up a training and social integration project for groups with disabilities or at risk of social exclusion, through an educational workshop aimed at providing support and training in horticulture and cooking.
Among our food provision activities, we highlight the harvesting of crops in the Ferrer Sustainability Foundations’ two vegetable gardens, one in Barcelona and one in Sant Pol de Mar (Barcelona), and the preparation of meals for social organisations and soup kitchens, as well as the distribution of food to homeless people in Portugal.
In the field of healthcare, Ferrer has organised activities in Mexico to support children with chronic or advanced diseases.
To learn more about the Ferrer for Food initiative, please visit the Ferrer Foundation’s website and read our 2022 report.