Help the world's 1st free holistic health centre

Dear friends,

Welcome to the world's first free holistic health centre and sanctuary for all species - human and otherwise. The Garden is a service and societal model that has been necessary for a long time.

Those in need will be able to be accommodated in a beautiful relaxing natural setting. We are fundraising for and setting up a significant social movement. Our first upcoming eco-village will be Portugal. The Garden is a better society - based on real integrative health, symbiosis with our home planet, compassion, and skill-sharing and skill development, run by over a hundred people with expertise and experience in varied healing modalities, ecological building, food-gardening and social entrepreneurship.

Its roots go deep because The Garden is the collaborative response to our wanting something that feels more right - a way of life more meaningful, natural, fulfilling and connected.

We are a progressive permacultural community and retreat space built around a radical and much-needed new healthcare model: results-based holistic medicine, offered by a large team of passionate voluntary staff chosen for their varied therapeutic specialisms, without a price-tag. For those needing inpatient care, accommodation will be provided for as many as donations allow us to build for, in modest eco-houses spaced for peaceful privacy in beautiful and healthful natural surroundings. 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.

Food will be organic, grown on site, and prepared by the several naturopathic chefs on the team, from garden to plate.

We are currently at the fundraising stage for the land and buildings. We have the people, the skills and the resolve. Help put us to work. To achieve our significant goal of establishing a health clinic that is free for all to use, staffed entirely by volunteers, and to accommodate, feed, medicate, educate and empower residential and non-residential patients, we need to buy land and medical stock, and - to begin with - build at least 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 eco-builders operating from the heart are ready to construct from cob, straw, earth-bags and local rock and wood. The project will likely open in Portugal, because land is relatively cheap there and the government is refreshingly 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 food costs for patients and staff will be zero.

The projected financial budget for the initial community (expanding with demand and donations) is:

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, fees, expenses 25,000

About The Garden's founder:

Hi! I'm Leo. My background is in healthcare, healing without harm, and voluntary work for humans and other animals. In 2001 I decided to become a children’s doctor. After shadowing hospital consultants as part of my studies, I saw that the bulk of my job would be not to heal, not to consider the individual patient, but to suppress symptoms, further compromise the immune system, and dogmatically push the money-lead agenda of the pharmaceutical industry. I saw that nurses spent a great deal more time with patients and could more holistically affect and improve their health, so qualified as a paediatric nurse and went on to study various natural medical modalities over the next 16 years.

Later I became a health lecturer, an advisor to several charities (Spirit Aid, HARF, Third Age Project and Rebuild Sri Lanka) 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 an expert on men’s health, to co-create a green paper on it. In 2011 I became a Health Adviser to the BBC in London. In 2014 I created the Swede of Light project: the first person to cross Sweden in a wheelchair. I cycled alongside a paraplegic athlete, to raise funds for Born Free, the animal welfare charity. We started 226km North of the Arctic Circle and over three months travelled 2,200km to the Baltic Sea, setting a new world record.

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. I have completed courses in Meta-Medicine, wound care, smoking cessation, Integral Eye Movement Therapy, nutrition, public health delivery, urgent care, and various other healthcare aspects.

My disaster relief and charity project work featured in television documentaries (ITV (UK), Swedish national TV, and independent). I have worked alongside governments, local authorities, UN agencies, and international and local NGO's.

In 2017 I lived in an eco-community in the beautiful hills of Eastern Portugal – part of the worldwide Ananda Marga spiritual movement. The national manager asked me to set up and run a holistic health centre there. I was honoured but felt it could not be truly holistic 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 this project was born. On board are naturopathic nutritionists, a homoeopath, a Shiatsu masseuse, a Qi Gong teacher, medical herbalist, intuitive body scanner, acupuncturist, ophthalmologist, yoga teacher, Chinese doctor, personal trainer, Theta healer, craniosacral therapist and more, ready to work.

The model is that all patients will be seen by all practitioners, thereby receiving the broadest and most profound care.

But funding is of course needed for this to happen.

Your generosity will be appreciated deeply, by many.

Perhaps you yourself will be a patient at the centre.

Lots of love,

Leo and the team