Do More Together
Community Engagement
We are a species that learned to tend living systems across generations. We pass that knowledge through action alongside each other. DAR's community programs continue that practice, here, in this place, with the people who show up.
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Each year we run a volunteer program that is as much about good company and shared meals as it is about getting the work done. People come from all walks of life. Some stick around for a long while. They all help make DAR what it is.
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In addition to our ongoing, drop-in volunteer opportunities, this year we are hosting an herbalism program to bring a small cohort into direct relationship with the medicinal plants at Elk Run Farm. We find that this form of community engagement is an epic way to take care of land, ourselves, and each other.
Why Community,
Why Now
A perennial system is a biological community. The species within it are in relationship with each other, with the soil, with the water moving through it. That system builds resilience over time, and benefit from human stewardship over long time scales. Perennial systems need successors. They need people who know the land, who come back, who remember what it looked like three years ago. Building that kind of human community around the land works the same way as building the plant community: slowly and with care
How We Engage
We provide opportunities for people to build a relationship with the land we manage while building relationships with one another. This year we're facilitating both an 8-week herbalism program and biweekly volunteer days. Participants tend medicinal plants, make medicines from what the land produces, and develop the slow, practiced attention that stewardship requires. We always make time to eat and play together, too, which is equally vital.
What We're
Building Toward
A community that understands and practices reciprocity and stewardship is more aligned with the principles of living systems and more resilient in an ever changing world. A community that is place-based and involved in caring for the land is more in touch with their own sense of worth and purpose. We believe these values ripple outward, shaping the way we self-organize toward a more just and regenerative future together.