land Access highlights
Communities Co-creating What Access Looks Like.
1. Liberation & Land: Healing the Soil; Healing Ourselves
Healing the Soil, is focused on 68 acres of our community campus, which is stewarded using Regenerative practices. Over the next two years (2), we intend to repair past harm to the soil created by aggressive and extractive cultivation. Utilizing farming practices such as: intensive rotational grazing, adaptive grazing, Biodynamic practices, companion planting, agroforestry, cover cropping, mulching, low-till/no-till methods, soil remineralization (biochar & azomite application), foliar health sprays, and Korean natural farming, we can increase soil health leading to increased resilience. The advancement of our soil health will correspondingly advance our ability to educate on the connection between soil health in agriculture and human and animal health as an integral part of environmental stewardship.
Regenerative practices are traditionally rooted in globally Indigenous land care activities; they bring with them the opportunity for access through education and relevant historical contextual connection for BIPOC & LGBTQ+ communities.
Healing Ourselves, supports the hundreds of annual participants (k-adult) hosted by PCF to camp, retreat, and learn holistically on our campus. Our educational programming is tailored for each group and includes collective leadership facilitations, and land stewardship foundations taught through art, music, food history, somatic experiencing, and nature based experiences. Our curriculum aids in the development of process thinking, providing opportunities for critical self-reflection to flourish. The realization of the human-plant-animal-community connection is woven throughout, with circle work practice at the core. These immersive events are co-created with school faculty and activist groups to bring humans back into connection with the whole. In this way we foster places for human beings to heal from generational trauma, through body presence and education in nature spaces.
Liberation & Land: Healing the Soil; Healing Ourselves is a chance for us all to thrive together with nature, by redefining conservation to include Regenerative Agriculture, “Hands-In” Education, Community, and Culture; raising the next generation of Seed-Keepers, Environmental Stewards and Culture-Bearers.
“This very body is Soil. My body, your body, every body, is just Soil Body.”
— Sadhguru, Save Soil Song
Educational Immersion Fall 2022: Great River Montessori School 5 Day Educational Immersion Participants & Educators
2. Summer Cypher; Triannual Wakanda Kick-Back
Three times per year, PCF is host to the annual Summer Cypher; Triannual Wakanda Kick-Back. Summer Cypher (SC) gathers family and community around the elements of hip hop, centering Black American, (African Descendants of Slavery ‘ADOS’) and Native American/Indigenous people. SC has evolved into a movement, reclaiming the Culture of Hip Hop to create safe spaces to explore human liberation both individually and collectively.
Collaborating with Philadelphia Community Farm SC provides experiential and reflective opportunities to rediscover and reclaim one's connection to the land through Hip Hop. With Hip Hop becoming structured through the dominant lens, the authentic culture has been overshadowed and is losing much of the organic process of mastering, practicing and expressing/ sharing one or more its five elements, namely: DJ’ing | Emceeing | Breakdancing | Graffiti art | Knowledge.
Wakanda Kick-Back was created to support access to nature spaces for the Summer Cypher community. During these evolving events, up to 80 people converge on the PCF campus over the course of 3 days and 2 nights.
Philadelphia Community Farm (PCF) in partnership with Summer Cypher; Wakanda Kick-Back builds & cultivates relationships, creating access for historically marginalized communities to reconnect with the land for the intention of healing, visioning and building community. The Wakanda Kick-Back participants co-create safe intentional experiences for people to consider their culture, education, and roles in the community through Hip Hop.
Wakanda Kickback: Participants at the Triannual Wakanda Kickback hosted at PCF in collaboration with Summer Cypher, MPLS.
3. The FOOD FOR ALL Project, 2022
Food Insecurity affects more than 1,000,000 people in Minnesota & Wisconsin.
Of those affected, 1 in 7 in Wisconsin & 1 in 12 in Minnesota are children. According to feedingamerica.org, people facing hunger in our area need $263,205,000 more per year to meet their food needs.
Fall and Winter are the most difficult times to source local organic foods. Add in the rising costs of childcare, housing, & transportation, and some of the most vulnerable people in our communities are often forced to choose between feeding their families and paying their bills.
Through generous donations and partnerships with neighboring food share and gleaning programs, we donate 2000+ pounds of produce annually.
The FOOD FOR ALL Project was created to increase access to local foods in rural WI to those most affected by food insecurity. Through this Mutual Aid program PCF was able to raise over $3100 dollars to support our farmers in growing and distributing over 14 weeks worth of winter CSA shares of no-cost Biodynamic - Organic produce to low-income residents in Polk County, Wi and the greater St. Croix Valley.
This work was accomplished through the generous support of individual residents of Minnesota and Wisconsin who donated during the crowdfunding event.
A burgeoning partnership with the non-profit Family Pathways, is in the works that could support Philadelphia Community Farm in continuing this program into the 2023 growing season.
