Our biggest new milestone was the Salt Spring Island Food Summit on Nov 26, 2023, which took a systemic approach to addressing the problem of food security as a way to attract a wide variety of representatives from many sectors: food production, processing and distribution, transportation, energy, business, government, regional folks and indigenous relations. The summit brought a bunch of new people into the carbon-sequestration/carbon-reduction tent, and took advantage (through a keynote speech, presentation and small-group discussion) of millennia of traditional indigenous knowledge in low-carbon food production, controlled burns, forest and wetlands restoration, etc. Since the Summit, we’ve been supporting the 9 project groups that participants signed up for; most have now met at least once, and 2 of them have made significant progress. Specifically, the 50 Farms group got a $159,000 CAD grant from the Investment Agriculture Foundation of BC (IAF) that marries food security and emergency preparedness as a way to drive the establishment of new farms and support of existing ones; and the Business of Food group established a pipeline of hydroponically-grown lettuce (up 700 heads per week year round) to local businesses, including restaurants and grocery stores. Our biggest challenge has been getting the indigenous led project groups on their feet, because local First Nations are overwhelmed, underfunded, and are experiencing frequent deaths and other tragedies that require mourning periods before returning to work. 