We are dedicated to designing, building and operating sustainable organizations that exist to serve the needs of people and the environment they live in. Specifically, we sustainably grow highly nutritious food and make it accessible to local individuals, families and institutions regardless of ability to pay.

 

To achieve this Mission, our Vision and guiding Light is to take a whole-systems approach that integrates consideration for the needs for people, planet and profit into a harmonized, synergistic whole.

 

Peoples' needs begin with the need for respect and dignity. To support these fundamental needs, we consider the next series of priorities to address basic physical needs, such as: clean water, nutritious food, shelter from the elements, clothing that provides comfort, sanitati[1]on capable of maintaining personal hygiene , and access to health care. With the these basics satisfied we feel that the next series of priorities lie in the scope of social interaction; freedom of spiritual and artistic expression, access to safe living conditions free from violence and coercive action of any form, access to education, access to opportunities to achieve financial independence, and access to related resources such as transportation, information, legal representation, etc. In all cases access and opportunities must be in sufficient degree to positively impact individual and collective well-being. Sustainably generating social systems that will ensure access to fulfilling the above mentioned needs to all those who seek it is at the core of what we do.

 

The needs of the Planet are equally essential for optimizing long term organizational function. The Planet offers more than just resources for human consumption. We feel Planet itself is essentially a publicly owned corporation that exists as both a sentient being and legal entity. And as such, is due the considerations now legislated for privately owned corporations. Who are we to say that Planet is not self-aware?  And even if not sentient in the human sense of the word, there are other parallels: Planet has a history, life cycle, vast database of both abiotic and biotic activity all of which follows the strict laws of physics and chemistry, including -  and most importantly -  the game changing phenomena of synergy(1). 

 

Issues of sentience aside, the importance of Planet is paramount when we consider how we exist on Planet as just one part of a hugely dynamic, diverse and inter-dependent array of ecosystems that in turn support populations of plants and animals all linked together by energetic flows and material cycles. Intelligent co-existence for Planet and our species of People must be based on an assumption that 3 billion years of history provide an immense and immeasurably valuable library of survival solutions vastly superior the survival “solutions” that our species has resorted to in the comparative blip of time that constitutes our recorded history. We strongly believe that these libraries exist primarily in the genetics of organisms that have passed the ultimate “survival game” and whose adaptive strategies and mechanisms have been passed on to us to glean value from and appreciation for; provided we are open enough to see them. In short, the point is that our Planet is an entity we co-exist with and whose features can only be viewed as resources when we understand the critical importance of careful interaction and synergistic design.

 

As resources are evaluated from a synergistic point of view, it becomes clear that energy is what drives everything. Designing systems that can be driven by renewable and low-environmental impact (ie, “clean”) sources becomes one of our most important design considerations for our food, manufacturing, transportation, man-made environmental and economic systems.

 

We view Profit as a feature of organizations whose design, construction and operation have been synergistically optimized. From observations of Planet's systems, we know that optimization of human-made systems can fully harnessed only when designed to maximize synergistic properties.   Profit in turn is the yield of such systems and exists as a resource for further expansion of synergistically designed systems.

 

It is from these roots that our current project: Growing-Together Community Gardens, Inc. is derived. As a non-profit, our business model is a hybrid of public and private ownership. While the organization itself is managed and operated as a private one, the assets and “profits” are publicly owned. The primary objective of this structure is to maximize benefit to the “...  people and the environment they live in...” as stated above. The private component is primarily intended to ensure accountability for operational and financial success. The public ownership is primarily intended to ensure the optimization of “customer satisfaction” since the customers are the “public” that owns the organization through the power of their purchasing decisions. Profits are distributed in a manner that optimizes customer-owner value by several means.  Profits can be used to subsidize lowered prices to increase affordability and accessibility. Profits can be used to subsidize the training of new growers who would then start their own farms to make more food available to other communities. Profits can be plowed into Research and Development efforts to improve yields, reduce waste, reduce costs, and most importantly, improve nutrition.

 

Focusing on food systems is a passion of ours for many reasons. Mostly because growing food brings together natural processes, is satisfying hard work, a gives a sense of community and an opportunity to serve people in that community.

 

 

[1]Synergy: Synergy is the creation of a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts. The term synergy comes from the Attic Greek word συνεργία synergia[1] (confer Koine Greek: συνέργεια synergeia) from synergos, συνεργός, meaning "working together". Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia