We offer food, connection and skill building to people interested in growing resilience and supporting
equitable food justice through a community garden project centered in practicing relationship to all life.
equitable food justice through a community garden project centered in practicing relationship to all life.
Our Vision
The Garden Project is a place where we come together in reverent cultivation of growth. We hold equitable food justice as central to resilience, and seek to resource communities through collective sharing of food and skills. As bodies touching ground, relationship is central to all that we do. We practice deep listening - to the land, to the plants, to the ancestral knowing we move with, to our embodied awareness, and to one another in remembered cycles of connection, creation, and harvest. As we grow together we practice learning, unlearning, reckoning, and repair. We strive to nurture sovereign and reciprocal systems of nourishment in right relationship to the Land and to the Land’s rightful inhabitants, the Abenaki People. From the individual to the collective, the Garden is a place where we ground to plant and tend the seeds of our resilience.
Who We Are
As part of our work of growing together in community, and as an expression of our Values, we hold to the importance of explicitly stating the positionalties we carry; both in our own bodies and in the body we form together as a project. The excerpt below is from our Full Collective Positionality Statement.
Collectively we tend a biodiverse half-acre garden where we strive to be in embodied practices of connection, learning, healing and repair. With the language of somatics at the foundation of our project, we understand healing trauma - collectively and individually - to be direct and essential work in mending the violences of racism, colonialism and capitalism. As a group of predominantly white-bodied people with settler colonial privilege, we are in embodied reckoning and active practice with ourselves and with each other around unsettling, anti-racism and decolonial work. Our practices move us towards centering relationship, ancestral connection, right relationships with all of life, and re-membering equity.
Collectively we tend a biodiverse half-acre garden where we strive to be in embodied practices of connection, learning, healing and repair. With the language of somatics at the foundation of our project, we understand healing trauma - collectively and individually - to be direct and essential work in mending the violences of racism, colonialism and capitalism. As a group of predominantly white-bodied people with settler colonial privilege, we are in embodied reckoning and active practice with ourselves and with each other around unsettling, anti-racism and decolonial work. Our practices move us towards centering relationship, ancestral connection, right relationships with all of life, and re-membering equity.
Our Values as a Project and as People in the Garden
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We center the following values, individually and collectively, in our work together:
(click to explore them!)
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How to get involved
The Garden Project is held by a group of people committed to supporting its values and mission. Guided by a team of core vision holders and supported by spheres of dedicated individuals, we offer opportunities for people to touch ground, connect and receive nourishment through membership in our various committed scopes of the project, and Community Work Days. Visit our page fully outlining the Scopes of our project below!
Membership 2021
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We are currently seeking participants at many levels of commitment and connection for the 2021 garden season. These include attending our Community Work Days (see further below) and a brand new partnership with Shift Meals.
In the 2021 season we are proud to be a Grow Team site for the innovative Shift Meals program, which aims to respond to the impacts of COVID-19 on the food security of Vermonters in the service industry, through the growing of food and food-growing skills in community. If you are interested in joining The Garden Project through the Shift Meals program, check out their website for more information, and use our Membership Application below to indicate your interest. For all ways of joining us in the garden this season, including attending Community Work Days, please fill out this application form: *Directions to the garden and further welcome communications will be provided via email after we receive your application*
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*COVID-19 and The Garden Project*
Garden Project Membership and Community Work Days:
In our work together, we are following best practices for COVID-19 safety, including physical distancing, mask wearing within 6' or less, and hand washing while providing needed community, connection, and increased food security in this time. We have been drawing on the guidance of the Vermont Community Garden Network to stay informed and connected to the ways gardens across Vermont are continuing to adapt and grow together. If you would like to learn more about their suggestions for your own gardens and communities, you can find a robust page of resources here.
Garden Project Membership and Community Work Days:
In our work together, we are following best practices for COVID-19 safety, including physical distancing, mask wearing within 6' or less, and hand washing while providing needed community, connection, and increased food security in this time. We have been drawing on the guidance of the Vermont Community Garden Network to stay informed and connected to the ways gardens across Vermont are continuing to adapt and grow together. If you would like to learn more about their suggestions for your own gardens and communities, you can find a robust page of resources here.
Community Work Days 2021
Want to check out what we're doing? Come get your hands in the soil and meet us on a Community Work Day. On these days we will practice being in connection with one another, with the plants and with the land, through movement, tending, listening and ritual. Expect to share and learn skills, nourish your body through dynamic movement and contact with supportive earth, and to build and deepen relationships with all manifestations of life. Ritual offerings and work done will be in time with the movement of the seasons and cycles we all live in connection with.
To join join us for a Community Work Day, use our Membership Application and indicate your interest in the Outer Scope /Community Work Days.
To join join us for a Community Work Day, use our Membership Application and indicate your interest in the Outer Scope /Community Work Days.
We are in the process of setting the dates for our Community Work Days for the 2021 season. If you would like to stay up to
date on these offerings, please fill out the Membership Application and indicate Outer Scope/Community Work Days in your
Scope of interest. Or email Mea with any further questions.
Each Community Work Day, held on weekends approximately once per month,
will hold space for centering, ritual and collective work, in the theme of the season
and resonance we are gathered in together. The general flow of each Community Work Day will be:
10am: Community centering practice, Opening ritual
10:20am: Working with body intelligence: Alignment practices
10:30am - 3:30pm: Moving intentions through work
3:30pm: Closing ritual
We will break for lunch in the afternoon. If you feel called, please bring food to share, there will be a grill available.
Actual timing of offerings within each work day may vary depending on the natural flow of the day.
date on these offerings, please fill out the Membership Application and indicate Outer Scope/Community Work Days in your
Scope of interest. Or email Mea with any further questions.
Each Community Work Day, held on weekends approximately once per month,
will hold space for centering, ritual and collective work, in the theme of the season
and resonance we are gathered in together. The general flow of each Community Work Day will be:
10am: Community centering practice, Opening ritual
10:20am: Working with body intelligence: Alignment practices
10:30am - 3:30pm: Moving intentions through work
3:30pm: Closing ritual
We will break for lunch in the afternoon. If you feel called, please bring food to share, there will be a grill available.
Actual timing of offerings within each work day may vary depending on the natural flow of the day.
Gratitudes
Our deepest thanks to everyone who is making this growing season possible:
Shift Meals - A program of the Skinny Pancake
Kim Tuluke Beyer & Geoff Beyer
High Mowing Seeds
Kim Tuluke Beyer & Geoff Beyer
High Mowing Seeds
And to everyone who lent their hands and hearts to this project in seasons past.
To see a retrospective of our collective work, check out each year's gratitude page:
2020 Coming Soon
2019 Garden Project
To see a retrospective of our collective work, check out each year's gratitude page:
2020 Coming Soon
2019 Garden Project
Want to help us to keep growing?
We would be so grateful to receive your support in helping us to uphold our Vision and Mission and Values.
We are currently receiving in-kind and financial donations to support our work in the 2021 growing season.
Find out how you can make a contribution to support us by vising our Garden Support page.
We are currently receiving in-kind and financial donations to support our work in the 2021 growing season.
Find out how you can make a contribution to support us by vising our Garden Support page.
Contact Us
The Everything Space: 64 Main Street, 3rd Floor, Montpelier VT 05602, Unceded Territory of the Abenaki Nation
