The project «Tierra Urbana» is centered in the experience of family farming embedded on a program of participative community development. Its practice contemplates didactic strategies to push the experience in-house into a community process with a long term goal for reaching food sovereignty. The interaction method of promoter volunteers with agriculture-practitioner beneficiaries during the learning-producing process impacts in several benefits in the mid and long term: environmental education and sensitization; environment protection; production of, thus access to, nutritious food; self-employment; recognition of autochthonous and indigenous knowledge; reduction of urban waste; strengthening social fabric through collective use of space.

Tierra Urbana runs in 4 phases: 1. Contextual design, 2. Training, enabling of farming areas and planting, 3. Accompaniment and coaching, and 4. Self-efficacy development and farmers network structuring. The program is an in-practice learning program aided by peer-to-peer learning, where volunteers promote the learning process of farmers by monitoring the work in the crops and spreading specific knowledge in the context of each family's space,crops and troubles. Learning between farmers occurs accordingly to the social fabric status, and, once begin, evidence and accelerates the process of self-efficacy development into a network structuring.. Both, volunteers and participants, receive technical and teoric training about biointensive agriculture; families begin in a small area of 1 square meter, so they can easily manage and care the crops and experiment small changes while learning about biodiversity integration and local ecosystem features. Practitioners often come from rural areas or has indigenous heritage, so that they already hold traditional agriculture knowledge in many cases, which was unvalued in their urban/sprawl context. Volunteers direct monitoring of agriculture results, looking for solutions about plagues or nutrients deficiencies, empowering farmers to conduct documentation and systematization little by little; so that they would plan more naturally each time they restart a culture cycle. Planning, decision making and labor, as well as inputs and solutions must become internal and self-managed over time, during the 3-4 years of project duration.

The program is already developing evaluation rubrics and instruments for new participants. Networks development and social fabric strengthening are features to be addressed by academia partners. A initial evaluation of capacity building was done by direct interview to first 14 participating families (becoming farmers), revealing more than just agricultural advantages and self-efficacy guiding process. Among the direct evidences of capacity building is the self-managed increase of culture area and the addition of plants to each garden according to each family interest. The farmers declared to find moments for reflexion with spiritual value by maintaining the crops. They had opportunity to scientifically analyze soil samples and learn about desertification process and soil production by composting. And, as originally intended, they enjoy being able to produce nutritious fresh food in their own homes and by their own resources and capacity, evidenced with the increase of culture area. This enables them to face social and environmental perturbations, generating resilience.

CAmbiental - SOSAC coordinates the Design and the Training phases, helping other NGOs or civil groups to direct the process of capacity building in the working community; additionally the participation of private sector allows funding the project and sharing the importance of food sovereignty as a particular goal for every urban space. Volunteers and funding from private sector participants have permitted the first year of implementation. This particular project (running in Las Torres de Guadalupe, García, Nuevo León, México) is a collaboration by SOSAC with TECHO Nuevo León, and with a community working team. Currently the project requires new partners for funding the further steps of the project and volunteers to complete the accompaniment and the Self-efficacy phases (see Implementation methodologies). Currently, Tierra Urbana is looking for new intersectorial participants, so that we can increase the number of beneficiaries and volunteers actively learning about and building food sovereignty. The Training phase iterates along the year seasons with new generations of participants (in the family mode) or with new intervention on the farming areas.

Grupo XIGNUX, Fondo Unido México, Prepa TEC Santa Catarina, SiMadera, TECHO México, Municipio de García NL