Education projects
Building Broader Environmental Literacy: Resources for our readers to educate themselves and their communities and build their environmental literacy. If we are to address the daunting, interconnected web of social and environmental problems, we must speak rightly, wisely, and credibly about what is happening in our world.
Free Environmental Curriculum: Curriculum, resources, workshops, trainings, and retreats for educators working both inside and outside of classrooms. As educators, we know how hard it can be to create your own materials, so we offer ours for free.
Bite-Size Books: A series of tiny books to provoke big conversations on environmental issues. Beginning with climate change and branching out to related topics, we are publishing a series of booklets on topics that need more publicity. Upcoming subjects include: economics without growth, foreign cultures’ definitions of success, and deeper looks into the political, economic, and extractive systems that make U.S. consumption possible.
Community Environmental Education: We see the need for environmental education on a wide range of topics for all ages. Most environmental education in the U.S. focuses on schools or on overnight trips for young people. We bring engagement with the natural world to the public in settings that are easy-to-access and inexpensive. Our teachers are experts from the local community, giving their time to establish higher levels of environmental engagement and literacy in the broader community. If you have a class to teach and need support, let us know! Check out our events calendar for a schedule of upcoming classes.
Local food and seed projects
Front Yard Farming—Community Garden Network: We’re building a network of landowners and gardeners to transform suburban spaces by doing more vegetable gardening in public. It’s a simple project based on the idea that there are lots of landowners who don’t have the time or energy to maintain gardens, and there are lots of gardeners who don’t have land to grow vegetables on. We’re here to match these people together, provide tools, expertise, and seeds.
Growing Graffiti—Guerrilla Gardening: It’s clear to us that lobbying governments, drafting legislation, raising non-profit dollars, and lots of other slow, rule-abiding, hope-defeating efforts can produce change. We wanted to make a radical statement though. The goal of our Growing Graffiti project is to approach urban food production from a fundamentally different angle. We want to put food everywhere. We want it to be an outrage. We want people to question their beliefs about how they want their home to look beautiful, how they want to interact with the land that we’ve paved over and seeded with monocrops of chemical-fed grass.
Global Seed Project: Seeds are the root of our food, and we have forgotten to care for our seeds. If we hope to create a future food system that will accommodate organic agriculture, we need to take care of seeds that were bred by our ancestors to grow strong without the use of agricultural chemicals. Seeds are alive, and our Global Seed Project connects seed preservation projects on four continents to share that life.