In our community garden, we organize seasonal planting and harvesting every month, and we present a healthy, sustainable, circular farming model in practice, and in parallel, we create our educational video series so that others can adapt good practices. Gardening, common cooking, common thinking about the possibilities of joint advocacy. Especially for disadvantaged individuals and families.

The Southern Great Plain region, Hungary

Our project wants to increase the decision-making inability and advocacy capacity of local residents. With the involvement of local non-governmental organizations strengthening cooperation, develops professional readiness, and describes opportunities for advocacy. We plan this through a series of programs that include gardening, vegetable production in our garden, from which civilians also receive and use it for their own consumption, or offer it to local NGOs. NGOs can produce marketing materials from it (health day) would increase the self-confidence of the organizations, reduce their vulnerability, give organizations the opportunity to rethink themselves, and our garden would also give them a place to introduce themselves. We hold a professional lunch with invited speakers every month.

There are 450 NGOs in our database, they need to be assessed on who is doing what now. We will revive them on professional days. We also want to reach out to the local population, which affects nearly 350,000 people to know what kind of NGOs are operating in the county. We organize joint programs for NGOs and locals to get to know each other, rebuild communities. We organize theme events, retirees, family days, hiking days, gardening, etc. We organize these days together with NGOs and advertise them to local residents. We want to function as a kind of local incubation community garden.

We have already bought our community garden, we have 10 volunteers with whom we are now starting to plant the garden, we have launched a community seedling planting campaign for May 15-16 to join the Community Week program series who come to help plant, get from the crop, there are 6 applicants so far. We maintain long-term motivation through continuous communication, community actions, programs, and press coverage (our partners are the county media). We compile a portfolio of the garden and related program opportunities, presenting it in person to NGOs because experience shows that personal contact is lasting. Based on personal discussions, we assess what the bodies need. Based on these, we build our community building strategy between NGOs. We make idea maps and organize professional lunches. Awakening NGOs is one of the most important, and we achieve this by taking the burden off their shoulders, helping to redefine themselves and finding a way back to their target group. And through community actions and events, we show the population that non-governmental organizations are not people sitting in offices, but actively contribute to improving the way of life and strengthening the advocacy capacity of the local community.

In a 1 year we expect the peaceful county organizations to get to know each other better, learn to cooperate, and be able to organize more quality programs for the local population. Our foundation can function as an umbrella organization, and seasonal community events are established in the community garden, e.g. strawberry harvest, apricot jam cooking. We can start our complex adventure tours, presenting local values, on foot, by bike and on water, thus increasing the tourist value of the region, we would also like to host foreign NGOs on these tours. In the 2nd year we would like to establish a community garden for this model in Bács-Kiskun county, then in the 3rd year in Csongrád county. The community garden would be an enviroment for the reactivation of NGOs.

During the cultivation of the garden, during the organization of the work, the members of the non-governmental organizations go through the steps of community decision-making, e.g. who wants to sow where, let the biodiversity of the garden remain, but in the meantime everyone will find joy in the garden. During the creation of various community actions, who is responsible for what, e.g. when we set up a mobile park for children, what activities need to be organized, announced and booked in advance. We want to instill the possibility of bottom-up initiatives in the population, and to build good relations with their representatives and NGOs, we want to channel the power of community advocacy into the local power structure, to show the power of reasonable debate in practice.

Péter Gyebnár, the founder of the Foundation for Sustainable Region, is active in environmental protection, community building, community relations, and is a regularly invited participant in the events of farmers, entrepreneurs and young people in Békés County. Emőke Gyebnár is an experienced event organizer with active press relations. Móni Polgár is our assistant, who is responsible for photo and video communication with the community, and coordination of volunteers. Our team has been working together for years and we have several winning projects, but we have not yet appeared internationally.

Personnel costs for 1 year(event organizer, office assistant, volunteer coordinator in one person): 10310 EUR

Guest performer awards for 12 events (gardeners, nutritionists, local producers, community professionals, human rights associations, etc.): 12000EUR

Garden expenses for 1 year (garden tools, seeds, protective clothing, raw materials, garden machinery)
10690 EUR

It is understandable that we want to present and document circular farming, hold trainings and lectures in the garden, on the one hand for non-governmental organizations, and on the other hand organize events and garden days where the attitude of local residents.