Gathering in Community Around Tea Creek & Local Food Security

On Sunday evening (February 22nd), we gathered at Centre 64 for CommuniTEA — a sharing of seeds, food, conversation, and a screening of Tea Creek, the powerful documentary following Jacob Beaton and the team at Tea Creek Farm in Kitwanga, BC.

Before and after the film, locals shared conversation over warm soup, bannock, and snacks generously prepared by Healthy Kimberley Food Recovery Depot. Free seeds for the upcoming growing season were available through the Kimberley Seed Library, alongside information about local community gardens, backyard growing, an upcoming Seedy Saturday event, and other local food security initiatives across the Kimberley Cranbrook area. The evening naturally flowed into a thoughtful Q&A discussion after the screening — a reminder that food brings us together not just to grow and eat, but to learn, reflect, and build community.

The documentary tells the story of Tea Creek, an Indigenous-led training centre and farm focused on restoring food sovereignty, land-based knowledge, and community resilience on Gitxsan territory. As the film makes clear, Tea Creek is not just a farm — it is a place of healing, skills-building, and cultural revitalization.

One of the most powerful threads in the film is the honest tension between hope and uncertainty. Tea Creek produces tens of thousands of pounds of food each year and trains Indigenous participants to carry those skills back to their own communities — yet stable funding has remained a challenge, even as the work has received national recognition. In 2022, Jacob Beaton and his wife, Jessica Ouellett, were named Canada’s Food Heroes by the United Nations and received a B.C. Land Award for best use of food land — acknowledgements that underscore both the impact of their work and the reality that recognition does not always guarantee long-term financial stability.

A closing moment from Tea Creek, highlighting both recognition and ongoing uncertainty.

While the film ends on a note of uncertainty, there has been encouraging news since its 2024 release. In March 2025, Tea Creek was awarded $1 million through United Way BC’s Large Food Infrastructure Grant, in partnership with the Province of BC through the Ministry of Social Development & Poverty Reduction (read more here). The funding will support the development of a 4,000-square-foot Longhouse Food Hub and Training Centre in the Skeena Valley — strengthening food skills training, cultural preservation, storage infrastructure, and Indigenous-led food businesses (and if you follow Tea Creek on Facebook or Instagram you can watch this exciting project develop).

That kind of investment matters, as it speaks to the growing recognition that Indigenous-led food sovereignty work is not only necessary — it is foundational to building resilient food systems across this province. It is also a reminder that when communities persevere through uncertainty, action rooted in shared values can continue to move forward.

Thank you to Sue-Anne from Strawberries and Sweetgrass Indigenous Food Systems and Farm to Cafeteria Canada for organizing the evening, and to Healthy Kimberley Food Recovery Depot, Wildsight Community Garden, Kimberley Edible Gardens & Greenhouse, United Way BC, and all Kimberley Cranbrook Food Network members who helped make the gathering possible. And thank you to everyone who came out, stayed curious, and contributed to the conversations before and after the screening.

If you weren’t able to attend, Tea Creek is available to watch for free through CBC’s Absolutely Canadian documentary series.

As Jacob Beaton says in the film: “Part of this story for me is that we need to be able to talk about both sides of this reality. We have this horrible, painful, exhausting, and sometimes hopeless situation—then we also have this opportunity and this hope.”

Sunday night was about holding both realities — and reminding each other of the many ways we can lean into the possibility that exists in our communities. Because when we gather around shared values like local food security and what can be done through individual & collective actions, we don’t just witness solutions — we help bring them to life wherever we live.