Community Evolves with Shared Well-Being
by Leigh Adams and Shawn Maestretti
Building community while building hugels at one of our hands-on workshops. Photo: Shawn Maestretti
Studio Petrichor’s work focuses on building a healthy soil community that supports life-giving water and biodiversity. Healthy soil contains sufficient organic materials to supply living organisms with the nutrients and components they require. When that balance occurs, the soil community supports and enhances plants and trees above ground. Healthy plants above ground create abundance for pollinators, birds, and the rest of the food chain (including humans), which in turn supports soil health and a robust soil-food web. Something similar happens at our workshops. When we work together as a community to improve the health of our soil, it creates an ever-rippling, feedback loop effect.
When people come together and learn, they want to move into action and “do something”. Our community actions are populated by strangers seeking a better way of supporting biodiversity and building healthy habitats for themselves and their families. As they work alongside one another on one of our projects, they begin to share: first tools and information, then stories followed by a sense of shared achievement. Some people reconnect with old friends or neighbors and others make new friendships. We share the work together and “community” is formed around the simple things, like conversations about our children and jobs. Phone numbers are exchanged. Sometimes we see attendees together at the next workshop, supporting one another. A healthy community supports and begets more community. We can do this! We can do it together.
Studio Petrichor’s focus is on reimagining and restoring ecological knowledge through design while educating communities to become agents of change to protect and honor natural, living systems. This has been a successful, ever-growing journey over the last few years and we wish to share that success with you. Our presentations and workshops have awakened a greater sense of self in communities around the state and catapulted many of them into action. Though we are in challenging times, it is important to remember that “this too will pass” and that what 2020 has shown us – uncomfortable as it may have been – is that 2021 will be an opportunity for us to be better humans.