Future of Food Youth Design Challenge winner

A real-world Geography solution

The Geography Club is a HSIE co-curricular activity giving interested geographers the opportunity to meet at lunchtime to refine their Geography skills, discuss geographical contemporary issues and enter real world competitions. A huge congratulations to Kate Pitman-Fernandez from Year 11 for winning the Senior Category of The Future of Food Youth Design Challenge! This competition is hosted by The Young Change Agents which is a nonprofit social enterprise leading the way in youth entrepreneurship in Australia. To share her idea, Kate made a live presentation to an audience of judges, people in the industry, and educators last night via Zoom.

Kate’s idea of a PlantBox was to provide families living in ‘food deserts’ with a flexible, accessible way to cultivate healthy food that they can eat. Kate also hopes that the PlantBox will provide practical knowledge regarding nutrition and growing food to the greater community. Kate has won a Change Agents prize pack, two virtual mentoring sessions to help her idea progress, $100 in seed money to further develop her idea, or a $100 voucher to Kakadu Plum. A huge thank you to Natalie Fairfax for supporting Kate in entering her PlantBox idea into this competition.

Brigida Zagora
Head of HSIE (Humanities and Social Sciences)

Student Reflection

Student Reflection

I was announced as one of the winners of the Future of Food Youth Design Challenge. This Australia-wide challenge asked participants to engage in an ideation process and ‘reimagine the future of food’. This prompt called on me to consider the social, ethical and environmental issues associated with the way we currently grow, interact, distribute and consume food.

Throughout this ideation process, I identified the issues of ‘food deserts’, which are areas wherein residents lack access to affordable healthy food or contain a high ratio of unhealthy food outlets to healthy food outlets, and a lack of hands-on engagement with education regarding healthy food choices. Food deserts also disproportionately affect people living in rural or low socioeconomic areas.

My solution, ‘The PlantBox’, involved a cross sectional approach that provided students with the materials to establish a self-sustaining plant garden. This intersected with a school curriculum that places an increased emphasis on providing students with a practical knowledge of cultivating food, particularly vegetables and fruits. This came in the form of a foldable box able to be posted across Australia to rural communities, which can assume two forms: an entirely self contained ‘plant box’ that can be used in indoor spaces, or a box that can be folded out to convert into a plant bed that can be placed outside to cultivate an even wider variety of crops. Contained within this box were all materials and tools needed to establish a self-sustaining garden, such as compressed soil, gloves, various seeds suitable for the region and so on.

I believe this solution provides students across Australia with access to healthy food options to incorporate into their diet, and gives them the opportunity to put theoretical knowledge into practice. This will lay the foundations for healthy decision making when it comes to food choices throughout one’s life.

Kate Pitman Fernandez
Year 11