To all of our current & future supporters,
We believe that the healing of people and of Earth are one process. As cells make up organs, and organs make a body, we believe that people are a crucial organ of this EarthBody.
What does it mean to treat this Earth as our Body?
There are thousands of examples of cultures around the world that believed and treated Earth as one living whole. For tens of thousands of years, most human cultures have lived in community and balance with the rest of this body, learning to listen and care for other beings as their family.
We come from cultures that colonialism has fought to destroy and disempower, but how can love ever be buried? Our resilience has kept our languages, seeds, foods, art, technologies, and spirit alive.
Our ancestors saw soil as our skin, our tears as the oceans, our movement as the wind, and our resilience as fire. Remembering that we are in relationship with earth and not occupying earth can help break the colonial illusion that humans are separate from earth.
Sarvodaya Institute aims to continue asking and exploring this question within our own communities.
What does it mean to treat the city as our Body?
As urban farmers here at Sarvodaya Farms, we receive a number of follow up questions:
- What does it mean to offer space for healing to the people of our community? Many of whom have been displaced by war and experienced immense trauma? How do we make amends for past injustices?
- How do we come together and rise? How do people, plants, soil, animals, concrete and modern gadgetry come together for the future of healing we need?
- How do we find joy and community? What makes us feel free?
These questions circle in our minds and our attempts to answer them find embodiment in the soils of Sarvodaya Farms. We believe that, far beyond carbon emissions and fossil fuels, these ideas of relationship, communication, and care are what need revision in our culture today.
We are attempting to make these revisions every day at Sarvodaya Farms, re-imagining relationships between people, land, plants, and animals. Imagining a world where each part of this body uplifts the other, recognizing ourselves in each other.
And we need your support.
Most of our members donate $10 or less every month, and yet they together create over 40% of our annual budget, supporting everything we do: keeping our farm open, paying our staff & bills, supporting our farmer training program, our workshops & classes, our bee club, our online programming and more.
As we expand the reach and scope of our work, and hire more staff, we need your support in our endeavour to continue to understand our role as parts of this EarthBody, and share that experience and understanding with our community.
Please consider joining us and thank you for hearing our message.
- the Sarvodaya Institute Team