May 15, 2024

VIDEO: Mutual Aid, Agriculture & Resilience with Zev Friedman


Mutual Aid Organizing Strategies for Regenerative Agriculture and Community Resilience: A Practical Intensive, is a workshop where each participant will create an action plan for how to engage in Co-operate WNC’s emerging movement to grow a regional mutual aid society in western North Carolina as a transformative response to the social and ecological challenges we face together.
This grassroots mutual aid initiative uses cooperative economics to support a network of physical community centers that meet human needs and act as organizing hubs for regenerative land use.
Coming straight out of an analysis of the weak links in the permaculture and regenerative agriculture movements, our network is using powerful and historically tested cooperative strategies to scale up our collective impact and project success rates by sharing resources and knowledge more effectively, and by creating dynamic relationships between organizations and communities at a regional scale.
Patryk Battle, Zev Friedman, and Mari Stuart from Co-operate WNC will be bringing context from the larger global/national mutual aid and co-operative movements, as well as themes around land access, climate adaptive farming, permaculture, and agricultural economics.
The content is participatory and emphasizes participants using insights from the various presenters to start where they are with their life, land project, business, or organization, and apply cooperative and mutual aid principles to link it up to this collaborative approach.

8 thoughts on “VIDEO: Mutual Aid, Agriculture & Resilience with Zev Friedman

  1. Idea Plant rotational annual veg crops under neath the black walnut trees. We have a vision for fruit, nut, and mushroom hedges with scalable plots between (1/2 acre +) that rotate. Pasture for grassfed livestock, annual veg crop production, squash patch, asparagus, elderberry, berry bushes, etc. So many endless possibilities. We are bound like you described. We have access to few resources and few interested growers/producers around us that want to cooperate and share resources. We have been working to build a community and its not easy. We want to get to a point where our self serve market garden farmstore is pay what you can. Society has skewed the understanding of the value of food.

  2. We see a substantial need for an aggregate of artisan products. Locally, naturally grown (i have little belief in organic certification standards), woodworker building tables, cabinets; home knitters stocking hats & mittens; homemade soap crafters; its endless. We are also striving to have a commercial kitchen available for rent not only to farmers but also home bakers who are limited by wisconsins cottage food laws. We see that kitchen will have a monthly soup kitchen and fellowship meeting.

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