Current and Ongoing Projects

Community food security is a way to heal Mother Earth and revitalize urban and rural communities. We operate on many levels in our communities to do this work. This work is important to provide a demonstration of the possibilities to the greater community, and help build capacity for sustainable living and local organic agriculture, replicating projects and benefits beyond the site.

Wounjupi - Pine Ridge Sonsonate San Francisco Bay

Wounjupi - Pine Ridge

At Pine Ridge, we are working on community food security to reverse health, food access, affordability, and self-sufficiency. Specific tactics we are using to address these issues are:

Provide natural vegetables to significantly help reverse diabetes problems in the community.
Honor the land through organic farming techniques, enhancing the on-site gathering place.
Achieve a degree of self-sufficiency in food production, experimenting with crops to see what grows well

With enough success, produce will be sold as a small business—starting a small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.

Past work done at Pine Ridge includes: - Established nearly two acres of garden on a community food security project at Pine Ridge, by providing natural fertilizers, plants, soil amendments and pest controls

Conducted workshops on traditional agricultural practices for the families on site and the tiospaye.
Construction of a greenhouse;
Demonstrated operation of biodiesel/veggie oil truck

In advancing the project, we:

Provide trainers, information and experience through hands-on work to institutionalize traditional food security practices. In 2007, information covered will include seed saving, composting, water efficiency (drip irrigation, composting toilets, water catchments), food preservation (canning), and sustainable energy (solar panels and/or biofuel). One goal is to conduct a two-day conference in Fall of 2007.
Deliver tools, including a used tractor, trees, flower seeds, and soil nutrients to provide the tools for implementation, and use this as a demonstration garden to make the case to area residents to join the CSA.
Will help build a root cellar to preserve food past the short growing season. This will include a solar-powered pump to help provide sustainable water and energy security, and construction of a water line

Sonsonate

Over the past three years, we have restored nearly six acres of blighted land for sustainable farming and biodiversity, including building an ecological wastewater treatment system, providing soil seed and farm supplies for five acres of corn, beans, and squash, building a rainwater collection system. We have planted hundreds of trees to enhance surrounding biodiversiy, and built nearly a dozen high-efficiency stoves to keep the air clean, save wood, and address the respiratory problems of women who must otherwise breathe wood smoke in working over stoves all day.

Community health, clean air, clean water, biodiversity, and agriculture are all intricately connected, and we must rebuild communities on all those levels.

This work is important to provide a demonstration of the possibilities to the greater community, and help build capacity for community food security throughout the community, replicating projects and benefits beyond the site. A primary issue for Sonsonate is poverty, and the Nahuat community by and large lives at a subsistence level.

Developing capacity means sharing information on soil health, social entrepreneurship, indigenous worldview, biodiversity and a range of sustainable agriculture topics.

San Francisco Bay Watershed

Our work in this area focuses on an annual Certificate Training, covering an array of topics for sustainable living and community food security We are also in the process of regenerating three-acre of farmland near Gilroy, CA, restoring it to organic agriculture and providing hands-on food security workshops.

Additionally, we will be conducting extensive outreach on land and water health throughout San Francisco in 2008, to help people transform their relationship to the earth, and better manage the array of materials we produce as waste in the modern age.