Global Guidance Initiativetm

Current Efforts

Our current project utilizes the Victory Garden and the US Agricultural Extension Master Gardeners program as models for providing solutions to these problems, both locally and abroad. In its first stage, focused train-the-trainer boot camps will develop diverse, specialized Garden Masters who will return to their home countries to create individual food gardens, village gardens and community farm gardens in urban and rural planned spaces. The resilient food sources they will create will address basic nutritional and food insecurity problems. The program is also expected to establish international relationships, globalize business opportunities, and lead to the exchange of performance improvement practices.

Our participating Trainees are English-speaking country-based certified experts (horticulturists, permaculturists, farmers) who will be exposed to Trainers whose task is to provide a program that can be shared, duplicated and implemented locally, creating sustainable gardens in urban and rural settings. Our Workbook for the program is designed for in-class training as well as use in the field. The O-FII’s program is focused on knowledge sharing and designed to address local and international issues, producing trainers who will organize gardens here in the US and abroad.

O-FII utilizes as its primary resource text the California Master Gardener Handbook, which serves as foundation for the California Master Gardener Program of the University of California Cooperative Extension. This widely emulated volunteer program extends to residents research-based information in home horticulture and pest management, verified by UC experts. It assumes no prior knowledge of the topics on the part of the trainees. Gardeners become problem solvers. The California Master Gardener Handbook is a resource for scientific gardening practices that addresses the host of societal, ecosystem, seasonal and agricultural challenges throughout the state of California, one of the few states that mirrors challenges to food supplies, logistics, growing and agriculture in countries around the world.