Our Mandate

Our mandate is to provide a land-based learning experience for marginalized youth (specifically low-income, immigrant, black, indigenous, and Asian youth). We aim to create a program that nourishes awareness, compassion, and capacity of participants and staff, while valorizing their ancestral knowledge systems.

Our Guiding Principles:

1. Connect youth to the land in meaningful ways

The land is bountiful – it provides materials for building, abundant medicines, food, spices, clothing, and so much more. But we have to treat it right and engage with it respectfully.

2. Food is Power

Inspired by many before us, we seek to reconnect to the land, to our food and medicines. We have much to learn from the way our ancestors ate. Eating our ancestral foods can help us prevent and treat the diseases that result from adopting the Standard American Diet. We believe that reclaiming our cultural heritages of healing food and weaning our bodies from fast food, empty calories, and processed sugar is a powerful way to build resiliency, hope, and health in our communities.

Here are some examples of things that can be learned from food-based workshops:

  • Food and plants as medicine, traditional dishes
  • Using fire to cook, the physics of fire
  • Autonomy, cooking for ourselves,
  • Ecosystem and plant science

3. Valorize traditional knowledge and decolonize

It is our goal to use Farm and Wilderness Camp as an opportunity to practice traditions and knowledge that have been endangered by colonization. We believe that reclaiming and evolving our ancestors’ ways of growing food, surviving, and being healthy is an important part of the younger generation’s mission right now.