Collaborative Land Care

For 2024, EartHand is putting our Artist in Residency program on hold and investing our time and resources into learning about  different types of collaborative land care modalities.

Currently, our two learning gardens are run by volunteer labour for both garden work and program coordination, including connecting with artists for materials access and designing our free and paid  programs connected to the plantings in the gardens. We pay a small  monthly stipend for a volunteer coordinator managing some of the stewardship planning and communication, and funds raised through our paid programs are funneled back into the modest  artist research fees paid to our annual artist(s) in residence which helps spark new ideas, shifting our areas of focus in the gardens whole supporting the creative growth of artists to embrace notions of  locally grown into their practice.

All of this work has built up an incredible resource of the seasonal time-llne of both  material availability and physical labour; of what it takes to be a maker without first being a consumer.

Yet, this system is still overly reliant on one or two individuals doing the majority of the work, making most of the decisions, holding most of the knowledge of garden plans, as well as being “gate-keepers” to materials access.

We are curious as  to what alternative systems might be possible; and discovering what other ways of sharing both the labour and bounty exist.

A few of the questions we are posing include:

• How do we draw in new volunteers in a sustaining way in a city so challenging for most to have anytime for volunteering after meeting personal household needs?
• How do we acknowledge the complexity as lead stewards of  tending unceded lands when our ancestors come from elsewhere?
• How do move beyond the concept of the tragedy of the commons and create a collective, functional community agreement for the Care and Share connected to seasonal work?

We are excited to start off  this year of inquiry deep-diving into all things Collaborative  Land Care with Young Agrarians in their How to Start a Coop program focused on farming collectives.

A  cohort of EartHand board members, artists and land-care practitioners will take this 9 week course to help us collectively define roles we already intuitively have adapted, identify places where we can daylight process, and form policy for participation, and take this, and other research into the Commons and beyond. The individuals in our cohort are: Nicola Hodges, Chantelle Chan, Carla Frenkel, Camila Szefler, Daniel Mendoza and Sharon Kallis

Though we are based in the urban area of Vancouver,  we have a large network that stretches far into  rural parts of the province and  we continue to act as a conduit for building up the British Columbia  web of both formalized and unofficial   Fibresheds wherever we can.

 We are excited to see how what we can learn and synthesize might become adaptable to the   gardens under our stewardship as well as other collaborative land care collectives focused on building a local textile economy tied to place and committed to restorative land care/ community-share  models.

Stay Tuned!