Big bend Texas, Climate Healing Wheel
River offerings, songs, and prayer run with SanArte healer team
We can all create Climate Stability
Big bend Texas, Climate Healing Wheel
River offerings, songs, and prayer run with SanArte healer team
Tressa, wiped her brushes clean. That was the last orange crate design commission in her queue. She looked at the wall and saw the arc of her work—all the crate art (she grinned!):
That year, 1910, she bought her house and paid for her mother’s surgery. All her neighbors and community members had sold their oranges and the community was fulfilling on the opportunity that their founder had proposed to her parents. Tressa reflected that the Riverside Inn macaw was a local draw. She shook her head…. The elephant! The owner of the “Elephant brand” navel oranges wanted his brand to stand out, she remembered. Well, it does!
In 1870, John North and a group of Easterners who wished to establish a colony dedicated to furthering education and culture, founded Riverside, California. Riverside made its mark on the national map as it was the highest income earner per capita community in the United States in 1910 through the vast number of crates of navel oranges sold. The Parent Washington Navel Orange Tree is a tree grown by Eliza Tibbets in Riverside, California in 1873. Growing these oranges continue to shape the culture of the Riverside community.
The University of California Riverside Citrus Experiment Station was founded in the 1860s and to this day navel oranges are sold every day—this client is walking away with his!
The Gless Farm now produces AWESOME orange juice. World Be Well founder, Gurumantra Khalsa, declared that drinking Gless Farm fresh-pressed orange juice is a new FAVORITE experience. But Riverside fell away from its founder’s visions, land use, and agricultural goals. World Be Well (WBW), founded by Gurumantra Khalsa, is a newly formed 501 C 3 and C 5, that evokes the founder’s vision of education and culture, with a move back to agriculture. Through WBW’s C-5 designation, the NGO can undertake scientific inquiry, research effective carbon capture to build soil organic matter, water, and land policies. Through WBW’s C-3 designation, the NGO can educate folks about agroecology, and outreach to community members. WBW’s mission is to educate diverse community members through on-line webinars and in person groups to inspire them to become farm cooperative enterprise owners.
WBW’s first On-line Webinar—in English—presented agroecology; farmer training opportunities; land use; how cooperatives work; and access to business farm loans. Community members, who step up to enable themselves and their fellow community members take on the opportunity to provide nutrient dense food to their communities, while growing an economically equitable life path forward for themselves and their families. By participating in WBW’s Cooperative Training Program diverse community members can change their joblessness status to become farm cooperative enterprise owners.
Like many challenged communities, much of the farmland in Riverside today is covered over with Amazon warehouses and the like, so land is tight. Five years into this Proof-of-Concept undertaking, some breakthroughs are beginning to pop!
How did WBW and Theo Ferguson, CEO of Healing Living Systems, sign off on a collaboration that confirms that conveners and developers of the Riverside Food Systems Alliance—Board President Gurumantra Khalsa and Executive Director Seth Wilson—could ally with HLS to catalyze municipal food security in the city of Riverside, California, as a Proof-of-Concept Inquiry. Steps we have taken in over five years of the HLS-Riverside Food Security partnership:
Step 1: HLS sponsored the development of a curriculum for training local Farmer Trainers: 19 graduates. Seth Wilson and Fortino Morales enrolled local Farmer Trainers.
Step 2: One of the graduate local Farmer Trainers, Maria Alonso from Huerte del Valle trained two dozen local farmers— “growing leaders as well as food”.
Step 3: Gurumantra Khalsa submitted an application to the State of California to found an NGO in Riverside, California, a community of few community advocate organizations.
Step 4: World Be Well (WBW), the community advocate organization Gurumantra Khalsa founded is both a 501 (c ) 5 and 501 (c ) 3 NGO. WBW has the capacity to initiate or collaborate in scientific inquiry regarding effective agroecology practices and policy development as well as education and outreach to the area’s diverse community members and possibly more than 800,000 immigrants, many of whom are farmers from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and other Central and South American countries.
World Be Well presented a Zoom event in August 2020 that highlighted Agroecology. Three .mp4 recordings of the event were produced.
Presenters included:
Paul Rogé, PhD, co-designer of the agroecological “Training the Trainers” curriculum, who convened the World Be Well event by inviting Riverside, a community with an agricultural heritage, to embrace agroecology.
Gurumantra Khalsa, founder of World Be Well, invited amazing local and immigrant farmers and local folks interested in farming to become farm cooperative enterprise owners. Two participants had some land and wanted to know is they could participate in landscaping/food scaping on their properties. Discussions include shares in profits, participation in the cooperatives.
Gary Peterson, Loan Director of California Farm Link, made it clear that anyone with a 2-year positive farming track record can get a loan with CA Farm Link. Gary affirmed that he works with cooperatives all the time.
HLS shared these three .mp4 recordings with the panelists of the Ecological Farming Association’s (EcoFarm) Spanish-speaking Farmers Panel in January 2021. Subsequently HLS, and WBW, received a copy of the presentations from the Spanish-speaking Farmers Panel as an .mp4. Thus, WBW and allies now have a full set of presentations necessary to support inviting Spanish-speaking farmers to become cooperative farm owners as WBW mounts their community member invitational presentations.
Step 5: WBW continues to seek land for farming. WBW is experimenting with landscaping/foodscaping in areas of Riverside where there are sometimes 1/2+ acre plots of land between McMansions built many decades ago. A major incentive to community members with some unused land in addition to growing good food for their community is that any farming enterprise of 1/2+ acres qualifies for Riverside’s farmers’ amazing water rate of $1.19/100 cu ft of water. Landowners can become prosumers (producers allying with cooperative farmers), should they so choose.
Step 6: HLS Facilitated a strategic discussion to forward WBW’s ongoing communications with Rivers and Tides, a land conservancy, to create land trusts for farmers.
Step 7: HLS connected with members of a California Latino Farmer Coalition (in formation) and invited them to consider locating their headquarters in Riverside.
Step 8: HLS supports converting IRS laws so community infrastructure can include food infrastructure that produce food products for their communities.
Step 9: WBW (Gurumantra and Seth) and HLS (Theo) met with Sarah Kaplan, JD, attorney with Cutting Edge Counsel, who is excited about our plans and is ready to support the formation of a Federation of Coops.
Step 10: RUSD (Riverside Unified School District) has received a grant from the USDA to purchase local food. WBW is hustling to train coop farmers to grow the food so we can sell that food to the RUSD for our kids to local GREAT local nutrient dense food.
Step 11: WBW is invited to create an On-Line Farmers’ Market for local folks to order their locally grown food. The City of Riverside is offering WBW a local Park as a pickup and impulse buy location.
Step 12: World Be Well NGO in Riverside: Action Items and Queries:
Backend Considerations:
Nicaragua
Full moon purification ceremony after making offerings to the land and Waters with
intergenerational community and sacred dance offerings to the springs. They caught on our
prayers as they are resisting the mining companies from buying out their communities. They’re
raising $30,000 so that they can buy the land instead of these horrendous companies that have
already ruined watersheds nearby. They are connected to a women’s coffee cooperative who is
also supported and partnered with the peace and dignity journeys prayer run