Meet Our Grantee: Ecology Center-Indigenous Permaculture Program

A Holistic Approach to Agriculture

Native communities and indigenous peoples have highly sophisticated knowledge of the natural world (land, water, plants, and animals) and have a legacy of sustainable environmental stewardship.

Thanks to grants from the Social Innovation Fund of RSF Social Finance, Indigenous Permaculture Program (IPP), a fiscal-sponsorship project of The Ecology Center, is working on supporting communities to gain food security and access to healthy and nutritious foods. IPP accomplishes these goals by sharing traditional indigenous farming practices with native peoples and local communities and by applying environmentally and culturally appropriate technology to these practices.

One of RSF’s grants supported IPP’s Wounjupi Garden Project in Pine Ridge, SD. Through this project, communities used traditional agricultural techniques to develop a small farm, to build a greenhouse, and to learn water conservation. They also plan to establish a CSA or community-supported agriculture group.

This year, RSF’s grant is supporting the conversion of a three-acre site near Gilroy, CA, to organic farming. At least sixty youth and adults from low-income communities from all over the San Francisco Bay Area will learn organic farming using traditional agricultural practices so they can take what they have learned to their own community gardens.

“The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most culturally rich and diverse centers in the U.S. People from all over the world bring their own traditional technology here and share this with others,” says Guillermo Vasquez, program director of IPP. “The grant from RSF’s Social Innovation Fund will support IPP’s aim to provide urban solutions for sustainable living by strengthening indigenous communities’ traditional farming practices.”

For more information about Indigenous Permaculture Program, please visit www.indigenous-permaculture.org. To donate to RSF’s Social Innovation Fund, click on “Donate Now.”

Monday, December 31st, 2007