Seeds of Repair 2024
Join us… Community Supported Hope
PARTNER in regeneration of land, people, and healing connections
RECEIVE shares of online creativity & connection inspired by the Growing Season
To join us, click the partnering payment button below:
Seeds of Repair are small online Seed Moments of visuals and word - invitations for attention to the quieting messages of the Diaspora Gardens-Lake Superior surroundings. The “Seeds of Repair” rootings are periodic longer essays, conversations, and creations which probe how the world of seed, soil, and soul engage deaths and births for transformation and repair.
Regina M. Laroche - African Heritage micro-farmer, mother, and woman of community arts and spirit - along with companions, crafts seed moments. These will happen throughout the envisioning, sowing, growing, harvesting, and rest seasons.
Please join the Seeds of Repair community. Regina seeks to be a vessel of healing and repair for the land she stewards, her communities, her family, and herself. She also seeks to honor and learn from the land’s indigenous forebears. We are in the midst of a prolonged time of un-ease and violence — racial, war-related, climate, and otherwise. Our health and social science thinkers recognize the current pain and societal ailments that stream from generational and historical traumas. Our country must contend with the damage to descendants of Africans and Indigenous North Americans who were brutalized and disconnected by enslavement and displacement. Every individual and system in our Nation has been harmed by this history and its fallout. Diaspora Gardens and Planting Connections, Planting Hope seek to be a force for generational healing, repair, and regeneration. We seek to build connections which strengthen us all. When we gather in various ways to acknowledge, lament, question, hope, pray and act, we together repair our world.
Community Supported Repair: This is similar to Regina's garden produce CSA - Community Supported Agriculture - in which a community of neighbors and friends committed to support Diaspora Gardens’ regenerative farming life financially and with encouraging presence. In exchange this community received weekly gifts of food, beauty, and wisdom from the micro-farm. Regina, her family, and farm were sustained materially and spiritually and therefore able to offer more nourishment and support.
You are invited to be a geographically wider ranging community of support to Diaspora Gardens and its Planting Connection Planting Hope program . In exchange you will receive Seeds of Repair Seed Moments and Rootings. And perhaps in this community we will be repaired and strengthened for the healing of ourselves and this world.
What you will receive:
Brief online seed moments - fresh, low-tech (minimally, if at all, edited), brief moments of stillness in image and word
Arts conversation mini events - recorded with Regina Laroche and Friends
Periodic online rootings - longer pieces which delve through written word, podcast conversation, or video creation
A gift harvested from Diaspora Gardens
Connection to an intersectional efforts to nourish and repair a small bit of our soil and soul
Small invitations for your own rest, homing, and repair
Time Frame:
From seeding season until the gardens once again rest beneath snow.
What you support:
We seek to offer nourishing, reparative, and connective food, herbs and programs that respond to racialized traumas and injustices in this time. This is a strategic transitional moment for Diaspora Gardens and Planting Connections, Planting Hope. Family and life transitions, climate and land transitions, and transition from our wonderfully empowering partnership with Echoes of Peace mean it is time to give attention and space for what we seed into future seasons. Last year was a season of rest and repair for the farmers/vision carriers/land guardians, the soil and the farm itself. Thank you to our community of support! We began renovating fences, layout, and practices. We enter this season to seed food, medicine, and programs as part of our continued re-envisioning, re-designing, and re-building. We are called to prioritize and strengthen our healing justice work - especially our mentoring programs and respite space, and as we shape our legacy in tending soil and community for future flourishing.
Our Priorities This Season:
-Repairing ourselves and the land
Whereas farming and healing justice programming are life-giving, these can also be draining. In the face of intensifying climate (environmental, political, and social) forces, we are reimagining care of ourselves, this land and shoreline, and our creative compassionate vision. It is from this tending of body and soul that we offer repair and nourishment to apprentices, team members, community, and guests.
-Prioritizing our PCPH mentoring programs and Immersion Days with youth and young adults; and healing support days - especially BIPOC, women, and those otherwise marginalized. (These include service to the St. Mark Giving Garden in Duluth.) The empowerment of this generation and leaders is the soil for our world's future flourishing.
-Continued preparation of future healing and restorative spaces for activists, educators, leaders, and community organizers promises regeneration of individuals, communities, and the movement for healing justice.
-Anishinabe - African Heritage Conversation between Diaspora Gardens and Indigenous farm Manitou Makoons Gitigaan for land-based and arts community collaboration.
-Values-based business model and structural development.
-Adding gates to our new fences!
-Developing our SEEDS of REPAIR Community & sharing the story.
It is challenging to run a farm. It is challenging to run healing justice programs. It is challenging to craft restful and reparative space in which to create, evolve, construct, and share regenerative structures and practices that nourish land, people, and our earth community. Your participation in our SEEDS of REPAIR circle offers needed financial support and encouraging community. Your commitment to SEEDS of REPAIR makes you a part of the Diaspora Gardens commitment to healing and nourishing the body-spirit of land and its human community. It is also an invitation, via the creative offerings, for you to commit to your own moments of imagination and embodiment of a flourishing future.
You may offer financial support at any level to which you are called. Your partnering contribution is not tax-deductible. You receive Seeds of Repair offerings in exchange.
Here are some samplings of what different amounts of support will yield.
$70 - provides 1 month of organically grown feed for our Diaspora Gardens laying hens
This supports eggs for community - Community Supported Egg shares, as well as free-of-charge egg offerings to underserved households and communities: from a neighboring tribe to Duluth neighborhoods.
$140 - provides new chicks and supplies.
Every spring we add young hens to our community of life at Diaspora Gardens. We provide locally grown, chemical-free fodder and feed to our more-than-human partners. They, in turn, provide fertilizer, eggs (if they're poultry), song, delight, surprise, and life.
$210 - supplies and travel expenses for 1 children's creative experiential session
Children from area schools, the local Rec program, guest families, and Duluth Giving Garden programs have found wonder, learning, and connection in our gardens through our Planting Connections, Planting Hope program.
$280 - provides access to one creative video offerings for women, children, youth, or families
We create and offer a variety of short videos for different audiences: meditation videos for peace and wellbeing, energetic micro-farm life videos, fun instructional videos, engaging art videos on culture and history.
$420 - wellness oils gifts to 30 women
Organic oils are infused with sustainably grown herbs (most from Diaspora Gardens), formulated and offered to promote health, beauty, and connection to heritage.
$560 - travel expenses for two Planting Connections Planting Hope offerings to the Giving Garden communities in Duluth
This allows the unique traditional integration of regenerative growing techniques with culturally relevant community arts to meet people in their neighborhood gardens -- growing food, celebration, connection, and identity. PCPH partners with the St. Mark Giving Garden for and by African Heritage people in the Duluth Hillside and Central neighborhoods. PCPH provides programming and organizational support for the Giving Garden's effort to grow health, food, and community empowerment in response to lethal health inequities. PCPH also partners with another neighborhood garden at the Steve O'Neil Apartments.
$1120 - 1 PCPH Immersion Day at Diaspora Gardens for underserved families, children, youth, or women
Groups and families travel for a special day of encounter with Lake Superior, storytelling, eagles, food growing, song, egg collecting, their own art and creativity, cultural connection, and a view of their distinctive place and potential on this planet we call "home." This program emphasizes the healing, honoring and celebration of people of color.
$1680 - fencing supplies to build, replace and improve garden and pen fence enclosures layout at Diaspora Gardens sites
The farmers aren't the only ones aging here! This time to replace old fencing is an opportunity to lay out growing, nourishing, and community spaces in accord with the wisdom gained from 20 years of growing food, people, and more-than-humans, and from continued study of regenerative and connective farm and community techniques. We received two many grants last season to build fences. Thank you Midwest Farmers of Color Collective and Marbleseed!! The new fencing is here and being installed. Now we need to purchase gates to complete the growing and pen areas
Or, enhanced rain water collection and watering system
Rain water collection has been crucial to DG’s sustainable growing model. It’s time to expand the system.
$2310 - 2-day residential training for aspiring farmers at DG or 2 days of restorative repair time for workers, educators, activists for Healing Justice
Intensive experiences are opportunities for hands-on immersion in small-scale sustainable farming life that is informed by, and honoring of, cultures and communities. Aspiring farmers of color are especially encouraged to participate.
Or, solar power system for one structure
DG has modeled a low carbon footprint lifestyle since it's inception with its water and heating systems. Collected rainwater plays a significant role in irrigation most seasons. We're excited to deepen our environmental stewardship and resilience by beginning to integrate renewable energy into our model.
$2800 - 1 month of support for Farmer Mentoring, Apprentice and Work Training program at DG
Diaspora Gardens draws young people interested in integrated, healthy, sustainable food and community eco-systems. The experience of growing food in the context of racial and environmental justice and healing is life-changing.
$3500 - Construction of one protected growing space (hoop house/greenhouse) and COVID-safe gathering space at DG
We continue to use our smattering of small high tunnels (hoop houses) to extend our growing season and protect tender plants. However, this larger protected growing area with fewer disposable elements which can also allow for easier educational experiences will deepen DG's sustainability, productivity, and hospitality.
$4200 - Provides a facilitated, residential retreat for area African Heritage Women Grower/Farmers (off-site PCPH Program)
'Planting Connections, Planting Hope's' way of growing food, medicines, and arts is intended to bring healing, resilience, empowerment, and justice into the lived story of African Heritage people and other communities of color and at the margins. This arm of PCPH programming is specifically to support geographically isolated women working and living at the highly demanding, and sometimes traumatizing, intersection of racial identity, justice, food, and community.
$4900 - 1/2 the expenses of our 5th year development of an additional DG Site: soil building, new orchard, gardens, pens, and structures
DG has begun the work of developing an additional site into a regenerative nourishing eco-system. Permaculture practices for a food marsh, pollinator plantings, fruit trees will provide food, medicines, and home for more-than-humans and humans, while providing experiential education and training opportunities. Fences are up for our first year of cultivation!
Your partnering contribution is not tax-deductible. Your partnership receives our Seeds of Repair offerings and supports Diaspora Gardens’ cultivation of nourishment, connection, and repair.
Your partnering at any level allows Diaspora Gardens to offer financial support, PCPH programming support, or food support to organizations and individuals living in service to building connection and community, or healing racialized trauma and division. Likewise to situations of extreme need. Examples:
-St. Mark Giving Garden, Duluth, MN (Food Access, Food Justice, Empowerment, and Healing by and for African Heritage people)
https://healthequitynorthland.org/giving-garden
-Tubman Network - Germany (providing support for African Heritage refugees from Ukraine)
-Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Northern WI
-Ubuntu House - IL (a startup initiative to create space for healing from racialized trauma)
https://www.aalr4success.org/about_us
-Sacred Sisters (a ministry of transformational wholeness for African Descent clergy women and the communities they serve)
https://www.sacredsistersclergywomen.org/
-Efforts for the healing of Haiti
-Building relationship and mutual support between Indigenous and African Heritage repair efforts
-Food systems efforts on Madeline Island, Northern WI