Grow Resilience is a new food-growing, community-building workshop series for climate justice in Hartland!
Throughout the growing season, we will collaboratively learn how to plan for, start, grow, harvest, save seed from, and store/preserve food from plants. Through community and home gardens and a series of workshops and meet-ups, we will be exploring place-based growing practices and the intersections between food justice, agriculture, climate change, social and economic justice, and community resilience.
The vision for the program is to work on the ground with partners to help increase the local, community-based production of food within the framework of the climate justice movement. We believe that growing food by adhering to regenerative, nature-based principles can help communities mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, while simultaneously forming stronger relationships and empowering local-level action.
All workshops will be hosted on Wednesday nights at the Hartland Community Library from 6 to 7:30 pm (unless otherwise noted).
1 – March 14: Intro to Grow Resilience (@ Community Breakfast, Damon Hall, 9-11 am)
2 – March 18: Designing Gardens & Starting Seeds
3 – May 6: Seed, Water & Soil Planning & Preparation
4 – June 3: Planting, Transplanting & Compost
5 – July 15: Mid-Summer Harvests & Biodiversity
6 – August 12: Preserving & Eating
7 – September 23: Harvesting & Saving Seeds
8 – October 21: Celebrating & Resting
By using accessible public spaces and external funding sources, we seek to eliminate any barriers to participation in this program. Furthermore, we seek to present this information in a community of practice model, as opposed to an expert-audience model, so that individual empowerment and leader/educator experience will develop more local knowledge resources and community agency. The goals of this program are to: (1) grow and consume more local food, (2) provide social and environmental context for food, plants, and growing techniques, and (3) build social connections around community resource sovereignty in the era of the climate crisis. We will be framing the food growing efforts in the context of a Just Transition as described here by the Climate Justice Alliance. We will be working with the concept and practices of transitioning from dominant extractive economic systems to exploring what it takes to build regenerative systems at multiple scales and shift the paradigm of how food is produced/delivered to, and consumed in, our communities. Ultimately, we are seeking to support a culture of re-building relationships with each other as well as the non-human natural world.