Our vision
We are working to co-create places for healing, knowledge exchange, and community abundance by centering the wisdom and lived experiences held within our communities of color. Through reclaiming our traditional practices and building deeper connections between land and people, we strive to bring balance back to our communities. We are committed to restoration in every space we occupy, so that future generations will inherit a world where equity, access to resources, and a healthy environment are shared by all.
Our Practice
Our mission is to co-create healing spaces for people who have been systemically marginalized, especially young people and people of color, that is rooted in collective intimacy with the land and all our relatives. We want to deepen relationships with people, land, and food--- native and introduced---whose histories have also been threaded by both exploitation & resilience.
Through our own Indigenous practices, passed down through our lineages as a recipe for healing, we want to heal the land alongside our people, creating spaces for reimagining, remembering, and joy. We also want to move with curiosity and openness as we work to unearth layered histories through a deep understanding of land-based relationships & ethnoecology and share these truths with our community.
We are working to:
Provide nourishing, culturally-affirming food to our community
As people of color, our foods have been continuously villainized, co-opted, and restricted. We know that food is medicine, and that our community cannot heal without access to the medicine and the teachings of how to use it. Through intentional cultivation of Indigenous and heritage crops, we want to help our community diversify their diets with nutrient-rich, ecologically abundant, and culturally rooted foods.
Create healing spaces for marginalized people
Healing is at the core of all our work. We see our present and future generations in critical need of restorative healing to move through the disproportionate trauma we experience. We want all people to feel welcome on the farm and to know they will be respected and affirmed in showing up as they are. This space is created by us and for us.
Rematriate the lands we live and work on
We are an Indigenous-owned and BIPOC-owned business that seeks to return our ecosystems to balance by placing land back in the hands of stewards who pursue right relationship with all the Earth. This farm is our own reclamation and assertion of our right to take up space. Honoring the sentience of the land and all that is living is central to our work. We believe in putting land back in the hands of communities of color and those who value people over profit.
Educate our community in ways that build lasting resilience
We offer workshops that guide restorative practice and center storytelling as a means of sharing knowledge. We believe that our communities should be equipped with the knowledge that can free us. We are excited to teach and learn alongside our community. All of our educational offerings are structured in a non-linear, multigenerational format. Visit our offerings page to learn more about our educational opportunities.
Why a garden?
The word "garden" has held many meanings throughout our history: a green space adjacent to the home, a slang term for the public housing projects of the 1920s, a place where people grow things, etc. We see our communities as a part of the land and hold the metaphor of the garden to mirror our own interconnectedness. We are a community of neighbors, farmers, artists, stewards, activists, and more. The "garden" is where we grow ourselves and our ties to land + community. We also see the land as both a teacher and classroom, and a beautiful place to center our work.
Honoring histories
We pull inspiration from the "victory garden", a space for healing, identity, and sovereignty during a time of war and trauma. During WW1 & WW2, victory gardens allowed people to embrace collective care while instilling a sense of shared pride and joy in their communities. Our communities are still "at war", a continued war against oppressive systems rooted in profit above all else. And we need to fight back in the ways we understand, like by feeding each other and gathering together.
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We are reimagining what our "victory garden" of today would look like: a fruitful place that supports our diverse community through food, nourishment, connection, education, and safety.
On Abolition
We understand the work of abolition and decolonizing to be deeply rooted in unearthing our layered histories and returning to a connected and interdependent ecosystem of life. Although we hold space for softness, we also want to be strong in this work. All that we do is aligned with dismantling white supremacy, settler-colonialism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, and injustice within ourselves and within our communities.
Our community values include:
Love
Interdependence
Growth
Liberation
Respect
Creativity
Imagination
Community
Care
Reciprocity
Be in community
with us:
We want to welcome our community fully into this space of transformation, questioning, learning, and healing. This is not a closed space, but rather one of gathering and collective discovery. We have several offerings for our community to join us in this work that can be viewed on our Offerings page.