Regenerating the Flow of Water with Children
Donation protected
In the small Colombian town of Barichara, there is a community-owned park that has been regenerating degraded land for ten years – growing into a permaculture food forest beloved by all who walk through its publicly accessible trails.
Thirty years ago, there were healthy streams and lush forests spread across the landscape. Decades of tobacco farming has stripped the land of trees and is visible as scars when viewed from satellites orbiting the Earth. Many of these streams have run dry and the semi-desert environment makes water scarcity a chronic issue for people living here.
We want to demonstrate that it is possible to bring one of these streams back to life.
Our focus with this project is to engage children and youth in educational programs that teach them how to fall in love with nature while building soils and growing a sacred grove of trees around the source of this life-giving water.
The amount of money we are raising is quite modest. We believe that $1500 can “activate” existing community engagement with Bioparque Móncora—the community park—and the greenbelt surrounding the town that provides ecological corridors for the movement of animals throughout the region.
With this money, we will support a local family with three small children that has been invited into a stewardship role for the park by the two elder women who started the food forest more than a decade ago. They have set up an escuela del bosque (forest school) that cultivates sacred relationships with the land while learning how to regenerate it.
Specifically, these funds will:
1) Support a composting project with the community to gather biomass and accelerate the formation of healthy soils in the food forest.
2) Enable a water retention system to be set up that becomes the source of nourishment for the sacred grove of trees established around it.
3) Provide a healing sanctuary for those who enter the park to feel the life-giving energies of a stream revived by loving hands.
4) Demonstrate that it is indeed possible to bring a river back to life while educating children in the art and science of ecological design.
All of this is possible because so many community members are already engaged in the park in various ways. The local family—Felipe and Alejandra along with their children Alun, Ananda, and Vera—has created a forest school program based on the principles of deep ecology in collaboration with the park. They have carefully built up the trusting relationships that make it possible to set this next phase of their work in motion.
My own family—my wife Jessica, our three year old daughter Elise, and myself—have come to Barichara for three months as volunteers with the intention of immersing our child in this kind of regenerative community so that when we leave Barichara it has more regenerative capacities than when we arrived.
All of the money raised will go to the community. Please help us make this beautiful intention manifest into the world. The Earth needs us all to be doing this sacred work.
Onward, fellow humans.
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Here are some photos of Bioparque Móncora and the children's school:
Thirty years ago, there were healthy streams and lush forests spread across the landscape. Decades of tobacco farming has stripped the land of trees and is visible as scars when viewed from satellites orbiting the Earth. Many of these streams have run dry and the semi-desert environment makes water scarcity a chronic issue for people living here.
We want to demonstrate that it is possible to bring one of these streams back to life.
Our focus with this project is to engage children and youth in educational programs that teach them how to fall in love with nature while building soils and growing a sacred grove of trees around the source of this life-giving water.
The amount of money we are raising is quite modest. We believe that $1500 can “activate” existing community engagement with Bioparque Móncora—the community park—and the greenbelt surrounding the town that provides ecological corridors for the movement of animals throughout the region.
With this money, we will support a local family with three small children that has been invited into a stewardship role for the park by the two elder women who started the food forest more than a decade ago. They have set up an escuela del bosque (forest school) that cultivates sacred relationships with the land while learning how to regenerate it.
Specifically, these funds will:
1) Support a composting project with the community to gather biomass and accelerate the formation of healthy soils in the food forest.
2) Enable a water retention system to be set up that becomes the source of nourishment for the sacred grove of trees established around it.
3) Provide a healing sanctuary for those who enter the park to feel the life-giving energies of a stream revived by loving hands.
4) Demonstrate that it is indeed possible to bring a river back to life while educating children in the art and science of ecological design.
All of this is possible because so many community members are already engaged in the park in various ways. The local family—Felipe and Alejandra along with their children Alun, Ananda, and Vera—has created a forest school program based on the principles of deep ecology in collaboration with the park. They have carefully built up the trusting relationships that make it possible to set this next phase of their work in motion.
My own family—my wife Jessica, our three year old daughter Elise, and myself—have come to Barichara for three months as volunteers with the intention of immersing our child in this kind of regenerative community so that when we leave Barichara it has more regenerative capacities than when we arrived.
All of the money raised will go to the community. Please help us make this beautiful intention manifest into the world. The Earth needs us all to be doing this sacred work.
Onward, fellow humans.
-----
Here are some photos of Bioparque Móncora and the children's school:
Organizer
Joe Brewer
Organizer
Eugene, OR
