Help the world's 1st free holistic health centre

Dear friends,

Let’s do this!

Welcome to the world's first free holistic health centre and sanctuary for all - humans and other species.

The Garden is a service and better way of living that has been necessary for a long time.

We keep hearing and reading people expressing dissatisfaction with the way things are. Grief for lost loved ones, lost time on the wrong things, lost ways.

So let’s actually do something about it - support and create a better way.

The Garden’s team of 140 (and growing) passionate volunteers - therapists, eco-builders, green architects, lawyers, vets and other helpers - is setting up this pioneering and desperately needed not-for-profit healthcare service in a beautiful eco-village in Portugal, where those in need can be accommodated in peaceful privacy in beautiful, relaxing, healthful natural surroundings, nourished with organic garden-to-plate food, and receive therapies (27 at last count), all for free to patients.

The Garden needs your help with a donation. Making the world we want requires a little help.

We are fundraising for the land. We’ve raised 100,000 Euros offline and need to double this online for a wonderful 28-hectare patch with waterfalls and fertile land we found in the rural East of Portugal.

Instagram: @TheGardenPortugal

Facebook: TheGardenPortugal

Website: www.thegarden.community

In more detail:

We need a better way than the fatally corrupt, profit-driven current pharmaceutical industrial medical model and societal design in general. The Garden is our collaborative response. It’s a nicer cultural paradigm, based on real integrative health, symbiosis with our home planet, permaculture, compassion, and skill-sharing and skill development, run by people with expertise and experience in varied healing modalities, ecological building, food-gardening and social entrepreneurship, to co-create a way of life that feels more right - more meaningful, natural, fulfilling and connected.

The Garden utilises over a thousand years’ combined healing experience across nearly 30 disciplines, for a happier and healthier standard of authentic living. We invite you to a societal model more suitable for humans.

We have the people, the business plan, the skills, the heart and the resolve. Help put us to work. To establish a holistic health clinic that is free to use, staffed entirely by caring volunteers, and to accommodate, feed, medicate, educate and empower residential and non-residential patients, we need to buy land and medical stock, and build at first ten ecologically responsible modest dwellings, the clinic, storeroom, healing areas, off-grid power supply and other infrastructure. Essentially we will build a tiny village. How can this be done for our fundraising goal of £610,000? Costs will be minimal because all labour will be voluntary, leaving only the cost of the land and materials. Our team of passionate eco-builders is ready to construct from cob, straw, earth-bags and local rock and wood. Refreshingly, the Portuguese government is relatively progressive and supportive of our cause, offering a grant for the food garden as it conforms to their organic horticulture initiative. Good nutrition - real food - is paramount in achieving wellbeing, so food will be grown onsite according to permacultural principles, and will be vegan and organic. This also means that, once at full harvest stage, food costs for patients and staff will be zero.

The projected fundraising budget (expanding with demand and donations):

Land: 200,000

Buildings: 300,000

Solar electrical systems for 10 buildings: 40,000

Horticultural equipment (polytunnels, irrigation system, equipment, tools, etc.): 25,000

Hydro-electric system from running stream: 5,000

Solar water-heating system for 10 houses: 10,000

Medical stock (1 year): 5,000

Taxes, set-up fees, insurance, expenses 25,000

About The Garden’s origins and founder:

Hi! I'm Leo, my background is in emergency medicine, disaster relief, and naturopathy. 22 years in healthcare and charity work with humans and other animals, transitioning from mainstream medicine to more holistic curative therapies.

In 2001 I quit my path to become a children’s doctor in disgust after shadowing hospital consultants as part of my studies, seeing that the bulk of my job would be only to match symptoms to patented drug products and push those - suppressing symptoms and further compromising the immune system. Not to heal, not to investigate causes of disease, not to consider the individual patient.

The mainstream medical model is good for trauma and diagnosis, and nurses spend much more time with patients than doctors and can improve health outcomes more, so I qualified as a paediatric nurse, worked in Accident and Emergency, then over the next 17 years studied public health delivery, Meta-Medicine, Integral Eye Movement Therapy, nutrition and other natural and complementary medical modalities.

I became a health lecturer, an advisor to 9 charities in 3 countries, and designed pilot healthcare schemes for the UK’s NHS.

In 2005 I met with Sri Lankan MP’s to push for change in the treatment of orphans. In 2007 I was invited by the UK government to meet with MP’s and the DoH as a health expert, to co-create a green paper on men’s health. In 2011 I became a Health Adviser to the BBC. In 2014 I created the Swede of Light project: I cycled alongside paraplegic athlete Tomas Wendin as he became the first person to wheelchair from the Arctic Circle 2,200km to the Baltic Sea, setting a new world endurance record in 3 months, to raise funds for Born Free, the animal welfare foundation. I worked in Sri Lanka for a year after the tsunami, and Nepal for three months after the earthquake, as a first responder and aid coordinator.

In 2017 I lived in an eco-community in the beautiful hills of Eastern Portugal – part of the worldwide Ananda Marga spiritual movement. A manager asked me to set up and run a holistic health centre there. I was honoured but felt it could not be truly holistic and sustainable with only one person steering the care of all patients, so I rallied all healthcare contacts who believe in healing without harm, set about planning, and The Garden was born. On board are naturopaths, nutritionists, counsellors, homoeopaths, a Shiatsu masseuse, Qi Gong teacher, medical herbalist, intuitive body scanner, acupuncturist, ophthalmologist, yoga teachers, Chinese doctor, personal trainer, Theta healer, craniosacral therapist and others.

We’re ready to help! Funding for land and buildings is of course needed for this to happen.

Your generosity is appreciated deeply, by many.

Perhaps you are someone, or you know someone, who can benefit from The Garden’s service. Or you just want to see a better world.

Lots of love,

Leo and The Garden team