Victory Gardens Co-op

East Van-based edible gardeners Victory Gardens chose its name as a nod to WW1 and WWII campaigns that encouraged people to use public space to grow food and, in turn, become more self-sustaining. Owners Lisa Giroday, Sam Philips and Sandra Lopuch bring that same goal to modern day Vancouver by teaching city dwellers how to convert their gardens for growing food. As Lisa says, “The momentum behind the sustainable food movement in the last few years has totally exploded. There's a huge culture surrounding food, whether you're cooking it or growing it, slow food and good food is a huge trend.”

Lisa and Sam were quite literally gardening one day in 2011 when the idea for their business began to germinate. “We started to talk about how cool it would be to teach people how to grow food, which we'd both been doing casually with friends. We wanted our jobs to be around food growing and were excited at the idea of doing this for a living.”

Lisa is a self-taught gardener with lots of informal training, while Sam is a master gardener. Half way through their business planning they looped in Sandra because of her complementary background in project management and design.