Workshops
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Abeni Pierson
Threadlesss Pine Weaving centers around gourds and pine needles; two natural materials that have been used across cultures for generations.
We’ll begin with an introduction to gourds. Before any weaving begins, we’ll scrub and clean our gourds together, connecting to the full process from raw material to finished piece. Participants will then learn the basics of pine needle weaving and how to use it to embellish and transform a gourd. Along the way, I’ll share cultural context, highlighting Indigenous, African, and global traditions that use gourds and coiled basketry for everyday and ceremonial life.
All materials will be provided, including prepared gourds and pine needles. This class is beginner-friendly. Participants will leave with a finished or nearly finished woven gourd, along with the skills and confidence to continue exploring this craft at home.
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In this hands-on workshop, everyone will make and leave with their own small basket, as well as the basic techniques to carry this skill forward. We will discuss basketry as ancestral craft, as a cultivation of presence, as a record keeper of people and plant, and as a meditation on the intersection of function and beauty. We will start the workshop with material introduction and cultural context, go into a demo and guided weaving time, and end with sharing and reflection. Basket weaving is a world of cross-cultural invention, of communing with land and hand, of patience and pride. I am so excited to sit with you in a circle and weave- as has been done by so many before us.
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During this workshop, guided by herbalist, educator and founder of Herban Cura, Antonia Estela Pérez, participants will learn about several medicinal and food plants growing in the Northeast and how we can build mutually regenerative relationships. On our plant walk we will learn basic frameworks for how to begin building relationships with the plants, so that we can continue practicing once we are back home.
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During Traditional Caribbean Herbalism for Healing, Resistance, and Community, we will learn about the history of Caribbean herbal medicine, cultural influences, commonly used plants, and the stories surrounding them. Specifically we will be working with Berenjena Cimarrona / Wild Eggplant (Solanum torvum), Sarobey / Cotton (Gossypium barbadense) and Anamu / Guinea Hen Weed (Petiveria alliaceae). We will smell, taste, and touch these plants used in our traditions, while discussing ways to integrate them into our healing practices today to support us in all that we do for healing, justice and wellness.
The Caribbean is home to healing traditions rooted in African, Indigenous, and Indian practices that have been cultivated to resist colonialism and oppression for hundreds of years. Over generations, Indigenous Caribbean, Maroon and colonially subjected peoples have turned to and preserved their traditional herbal practices in the face of oppression. We continue to honour those practices today to heal, nourish, and comfort the bodies and spirits of our ancestors' descendants.
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This workshop will introduce or provide deeper understanding of forest ecosystems and the principals that they operate within, drawing upon lessons from Brazilian based syntropic aka successional agroforestry and agroecology methods in the Caribbean & Latin America. The workshop digs into valuable technical theory: maximizing photosynthesis, the value of perennials, stratification, forest succession, support species, and more to support growers at any level or scale, while also being highly engaging, dynamic, fun, and spirit centered.
The Caribbean is home to healing traditions rooted in African, Indigenous, and Indian practices that have been cultivated to resist colonialism and oppression for hundreds of years. Over generations, Indigenous Caribbean, Maroon and colonially subjected peoples have turned to and preserved their traditional herbal practices in the face of oppression. We continue to honour those practices today to heal, nourish, and comfort the bodies and spirits of our ancestors' descendants.
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In this workshop, we will explore how farm worker-led organizing builds stronger, more democratic, and militant movements that transform workplaces from the ground up. We’ll break down the differences between union models, and take you through the organizing process for farm workers under the New York State Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).
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Gwendolyn Nicholson & Toshima Cook
Many black and brown communities have developed a complex relationship with land over the generations. This workshop is an exploration of these complexities through somatics, art and storytelling focusing on specific plants intertwined in this history, such as Dandilion, Poke Sallet, Goldenrod, Sassafras, and Wall Nut.
Join Gwendylon and Toshima as they slip into one of their favorite rhythms—granddaughter and grandmother journeying back through Gwendylon’s childhood, exploring her early lessons in foraging, old-country remedies, food preservation, and the deep sense of community she learned from her elders.
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Bees are our ancestors, pre-dating human existence on the Earth by tens of millions of years. When we host bees on land, they teach us about communal living, positive environmental impacts, and how to dance and make sweet treats. The goal of this workshop is to make bee keeping as possible as possible, so by the end of it, you will know how to manage your very own backyard hive! In this hands on workshop, we will:
Learn about the history of bees
Understand honey bee biology
Discover pests and diseases that impact the hive
Learn where and how to install a backyard hive, plus how to connect with a bee mentor
Explore how to source bees, hive materials, beekeeping equipment and other related start up costs
Be introduced to the honey extraction process
Buzz buuz!
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In this workshop will be studying the basics of Lactic Acid Fermentation, an ancient, preservation method where Lactobacillus bacteria convert natural sugars in food into lactic acid. This process inhibits bacteria, boosts probiotics, vitamins and enzyme levels.
During this workshop we will learn: How to make the simple 2 ingredient ( water and salt) brine, that creates an anaerobic environment, the different ratios used (2%-5%), and what vegetables are more suitable for this process.
The primary purpose of Lacto Fermentation is to preserve food without refrigeration by creating a highly acidic environment that prevents spoilage, while also improving digestibility and nutritional value.
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From the 18th and 19th centuries to the present day, sugar has been at the center of systems of exploitation — and resistance. Enslaved African and Indigenous peoples were forced to labor in brutal sugar plantations across the Caribbean and the American South. In response, abolitionists and free Black communities cultivated alternative sweeteners — maple syrup, sorghum syrup, and boiled cider — as a deliberate boycott of slave-produced cane sugar. The Abolition Sugars workshop traces this history, highlighting how sweeteners became a tool for both survival and solidarity.
We will connect these historic struggles to the work we do today at Sweet Freedom Farm: producing maple and sorghum syrup, growing grains, and using land stewardship as a form of modern-day prison abolition. We will share how our farming practices challenge extractive economies, build local self-determination, and reclaim land for community nourishment and organizing.
Participants will engage with historical documents, taste examples of abolition-era sweeteners, and explore strategies for using food production as a tool for systemic change. Together, we’ll reflect on how the abolitionist spirit lives on — in the fields, in the sugarhouse, and in the movements for liberation.
By the end of this workshop, participants will:
Understand the historical role of maple syrup, sorghum syrup, and boiled cider in boycotting slave-grown sugar.
Connect 19th-century abolitionist foodways to contemporary movements for land justice and prison abolition.
Explore how farming and food production can serve as tools of resistance and community building.
Leave with ideas for incorporating abolitionist practices into their own farms, food projects, and organizing.
During this workshop we will learn: How to make the simple 2 ingredient ( water and salt) brine, that creates an anaerobic environment, the different ratios used (2%-5%), and what vegetables are more suitable for this process.
The primary purpose of Lacto Fermentation is to preserve food without refrigeration by creating a highly acidic environment that prevents spoilage, while also improving digestibility and nutritional value.
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This Workshop explores cordage as one of humanity’s oldest survival technologies and a practice of relationship with land. Participants will harvest, process, and twist natural materials into strong functional cordage while learning how rope-making carries memory, sovereignty, and collective resilience. We’ll weave skill, story, and land-based awareness into a practice that binds us back to what remembers.
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This workshop offers grounded, practical skills for responding to injury and crisis using both the intelligence of the land and modern safety tools. Participants will practice wound care, bleeding control, improvised carries, and stabilizing the body with materials found in natural environments, alongside professional equipment. Together we’ll explore care as sacred responsibility, collective readiness, and an extension of community defense and love.
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We are living through liminal times that call us to dig deep into our ancestral inheritances of tenacity, belonging, and spiritual protection. What will support us to nourish and relate skillfully to the inner ecology of our hearts? What tools need sharpening to be in right and reciprocal relationship with our Ancestors, beloveds, communities, and Earth? How can we access our wildest selves in service of more robust joy and security?
Our co-created healing space will offer opportunities to:
Engage in embodied relational practices like somatic co-regulation (with the Land and each other) to explore sovereignty and connection.
Recall primal practices like shaking, sounding, and animal gesturing to awaken ferocity and playfulness.
Dialogue about protective ancestral technologies from our lineages, including casting a circle and grounding our homes.
Encounter the potent energetic medicines of rose, hibiscus, and tree.
Blend an energetic plant essence to support your healing and justice work.
Join us for nourishing and protective Heartfood!
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Filipino Martial Arts (Arnis) refers to a diaspora of martial techniques originating from the Philippines. During this session we will engage in a short grounding exercise, stretching and movement, technique learning, and partner drills. This hands-on workshop focuses on the movement and energy techniques used by Arnisadors to build awareness in their own physicality, spirituality, and energetic relationship to others. While many of these techniques are couched in a martial tradition, what we practice can be compared to tai-chi or qigong, in that it requires learning specific movements that can be built on independently or with a partner. This workshop can be beneficial for all walks of life and skill levels; those who make a living using their bodies will find more confidence in their ability to use their physicality to continue to do good work.
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The mandarin character, 氣 (qi) means energy, vitality or life. 功 (gong) means work or cultivating. Qigong, a branch of Chinese medicine that has been developed and practiced for over 2,500 years, is a method of self-care based on the energy systems of the body. JuPong integrates Qigong with kincentric awareness promoting both individual health and wellbeing and relational connection with all beings in the web of life.
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This workshop invites participants into the eco-political and tactile practice of papermaking using Itadori (Japanese knotweed), a plant labeled an ‘invasive’ species across the Northeast and beyond.
Together, we will learn how to harvest, process, and transform Itadori fibers into handmade paper, while critically reflecting on what it means to live, struggle, and make with this plant being. As we work with the plant fibers, we become intimate with its qualities and thus change our relationship with so-called 'invasive' beings.
Drawing from decolonial ecology and community-based land practices, this workshop treats papermaking as both a skill and a political gesture—one that asks how colonial land management, migration, displacement, and ecological disturbance are entangled. Participants will explore how making paper can become a practice of repair, care, and storytelling, reclaiming introduced plants not as enemies, but as witnesses to broken systems and possibilities for regeneration.
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This workshop is tailored to folks who have access to land but have limited financial capital. Learn how to start a farm with just a few hundred bucks and a lot of ingenuity. This workshop will include information about building with pallets, salvage and how to find it, library knowledge, and extension websites. The workshop will also include information on animal husbandry and how to care for yr animals on a budget, with informational resources and DIY knowledge. We will also have conversations around mutual aid, connections, and community building.
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Veggie Tales was Christian. Cedar Tales is spiritual. In this workshop we will wrap bundles of fresh and dried cedar in bath soaks and smudges while telling stories focused on masculinity. This workshop is a space for masculine energy to heal and gather with a potent, indigenous, culturally relevant, local, sustainable medicine. Stories may be recorded with participant consent.
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Come explore crop planning as a practice of conjuring, working with time, space, seeds, soil beings, water, and sun. We’ll imagine growing spaces where plants share dimensions above and below the soil, planning them together in living ecosystems—often called companion planting, interplanting, mixed plantings, or polycultures—while considering the beings of the soil microbiome, whose richly entangled alliances shape the life of the soil and how plants grow.
Rooted in lineages of storytellers, soothsayers, soil tenders, and healers, we’ll explore intercropping, polycultures, and succession planting as ancestral and current practices to shape thriving, interconnected living compositions, often where land is challenged or limited in size. Leave with practical tools and guiding questions to design layered gardens or farms, and new approaches to crop planning as a collective, creative act of conjuring stories with the land.
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Louis Tigney
Amateur Radio as Land Based Practice in Community Care introduces amateur radio (or ham radio) as a method to connect with one's local surroundings and community. We will discuss West African histories of long distance communications, disaster preparedness as community care, and how radio communications are shaped by the surrounding land and sky.
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Saving seeds offers us a portal to connect more deeply with our cultures, ancestors, & diasporas, while writing the stories we will pass to future generations. In Connecting & Storytelling with Ancestral Seeds we will learn how to get started growing & saving seeds as farmers, land stewards, and home gardeners. I will offer an introduction to crop planning in order to save seeds from your market garden. We will discuss tools & tips for creatively sourcing culturally significant seeds in the U.S. and trialing them for climate adaptation. Finally, we will go through a demonstration of basic seed saving techniques from dry and wet seed crops.
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Curious about what plants, trees, and medicines are growing all around you? In this plant walk, we'll stroll together, exploring locally growing medicinal plants, trees, and shrubs through a first aid lens. In our time together, we will focus on meeting and getting to know local flora that support common first aid ailments including: colds and flu, sprains, tick bites, wounds, and other common everyday health needs. Participants will learn to identify accessible and bioregional plants, while also discussing ethical harvesting practices, plant actions and energetics, and optimal preparations and menstruums for potent medicine making.
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This workshop will cover the main agroforestry practices such as silvopasture, alley cropping, forest farming, buffers, windbreaks. We will situate these practices within a lineage of Indigenous perspective grounded in relational stewardship, reciprocity, and place-based knowledge. We will review species selection basics for the Northeast bioregion- matching trees and shrubs to site conditions, management capacity, production and markets, and farm goals, followed by a facilitated discussion on barriers and pathways to adoption. In the discussion we will introduce common funding and support options (cost-share, grants) while offering a case example of a community food forest, highlighting how agroforestry can reconcile production with relational stewardship of place.
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This nuts-and-bolts session is for farmers who want to use grants to move their business or organization forward, but do not know where to start- or are tired of getting rejected. We will cover how and where to find current grant programs and other potential funding sources for farms in the region, how to match your project to the right funder, and how to write a simple, convincing proposal that clearly tells your farm’s story.
The workshop will also include a practical “Farm Funding Playbook” overview of updates to major federal and state programs. We will then move beyond cost share to explore more creative funding strategies, including local and regional regrants, private foundations, municipal opportunities, community partnerships, and blended approaches that can reduce match barriers.
Participants will leave with concrete tools for submitting stronger applications including clear problem framing, tighter alignment with funder priorities, measurable outcomes, and a narrative-to-budget connection that holds together. I will share practical writing tips, budget basics, and lessons learned from successful farm grants.
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Meditative Dance Song is a reclamation inspired by Buddhist chanting traditions and Mohiniyattam (aka Dance of the Enchantress), a temple dance form from Kerala; queered to support gender expansive expression. Though these days it is very rare to witness and participate in simultaneous dance and song, it is powerful people's somatic technology. We hope to experience the power of collective song and dance together as we celebrate the plants that continue to nourish each of our cultural lineages. Participants will learn how to craft a small chant (a seed of songwriting) and then sing it in canon. Participants will then learn some movements rooted in some of the gorgeous ways our bodies can make circles and fractals. Finally, we put the songwriting, canon, and collective dance all together!
The workshop will also include a practical “Farm Funding Playbook” overview of updates to major federal and state programs. We will then move beyond cost share to explore more creative funding strategies, including local and regional regrants, private foundations, municipal opportunities, community partnerships, and blended approaches that can reduce match barriers.
Participants will leave with concrete tools for submitting stronger applications including clear problem framing, tighter alignment with funder priorities, measurable outcomes, and a narrative-to-budget connection that holds together. I will share practical writing tips, budget basics, and lessons learned from successful farm grants."
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In Composting Toilets Science and Construction we will cover the science, ecology, importance, and magic of composting toilets. By the end of the workshop participants should have a grasp of how to build your own composting toilet!
The workshop will also include a practical “Farm Funding Playbook” overview of updates to major federal and state programs. We will then move beyond cost share to explore more creative funding strategies, including local and regional regrants, private foundations, municipal opportunities, community partnerships, and blended approaches that can reduce match barriers.
Participants will leave with concrete tools for submitting stronger applications including clear problem framing, tighter alignment with funder priorities, measurable outcomes, and a narrative-to-budget connection that holds together. I will share practical writing tips, budget basics, and lessons learned from successful farm grants."
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In Relational Governance Practice for Building Power we will engage with tools I have gathered from a 25 year background in hands-on Indigenous, community based infrastructure development and community building. These tools apply across cultures to bring communities and people together to build, design, and hold us in good relationship as we offer our contributions to this world.
We have the knowledge, vision, and skill to build the world we know is possible. Often, the challenge we face is rooted in the impacts of colonial culture and white supremacy culture. Our disconnection from each other, and our internal division and pain stands in the way of our collective decision making. In this workshop we will practically collaborate on the creation of structures of accountability, care, and reciprocity that provide a healthy foundation for action.
The workshop will also include a practical “Farm Funding Playbook” overview of updates to major federal and state programs. We will then move beyond cost share to explore more creative funding strategies, including local and regional regrants, private foundations, municipal opportunities, community partnerships, and blended approaches that can reduce match barriers.
Participants will leave with concrete tools for submitting stronger applications including clear problem framing, tighter alignment with funder priorities, measurable outcomes, and a narrative-to-budget connection that holds together. I will share practical writing tips, budget basics, and lessons learned from successful farm grants."
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In this workshop we will learn how to save and expand mushroom genetics in two different mediums; agar plates, and grain bags . Along with basic mycology terms, participants will learn how to make transfers to and from agar petri dishes, this method helps for long term storage of mycelium. We will go over how you can save local genetics found while foraging, and learn how to inoculate grain using agar plates and colonized grain to make grain spawn bags. Equipped with agar plates and grain spawn bags, you'll be ready to more deeply explore the world of mycology for yourself.
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This workshop provides a practical introduction to soil biology as the foundation of regenerative land stewardship. Participants will learn how soil organisms influence nutrient cycling, soil structure, water dynamics, and plant health, and how everyday land management decisions affect these processes. Drawing from farm, orchard, community garden, and urban soil examples, the session emphasizes observation-based decision making and low-disturbance practices that support soil life across diverse landscapes.
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This hands-on workshop introduces participants to low-cost, accessible soil biostimulants that support soil biology and plant health. Participants will learn how to prepare simple microbial inputs such as lactic acid bacteria and locally sourced microbial ferments, while discussing appropriate use, safety considerations, and application strategies across farms, gardens, orchards, and community land projects. The focus is on practical skill-building using non-proprietary methods that can be adapted to local contexts.
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Stewarding land requires resourcefulness and creativity. In EmPowering Ourselves: Power Tools 101 we will grow our comfort level with a variety of power tools: jigsaw, miter saw, drills, and more. During this workshop you will be able to work on a specific project, or just practice getting comfortable with each tool in community. PPE options will be provided.
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Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch
What does sailing have to do with land, food, and climate justice? In Sailing for Social Justice we will explore moments in time where water vessels (e.g., canoes, boats, ships) have played a central role in activist movements. We will make connections between navigating waterways and navigating systems of oppression, and finally we will uplift the significance of global BIPOC seafaring traditions for building a livable and sustainable future for all.
This workshop will involve a presentation, small and large group discussion, and reflective writing prompts.
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In a a quickly shifting Federal landscape what are the best practices and strategies when thinking about preparing a proposal? In this session we will discuss what this shifting landscape means currently and into the future. Federal funding opportunities remain available and the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (NE SARE) remains in operation. NE SARE is a farmer first program that is legislated through Congress and funded by NIFA, USDA. In Navigating the Federal Landscape: The Northeast SARE example, we will discuss the ins and outs of being an organization that is Federally funded, knowing how critical it is that we adhere to both our legislative and administrative priorities. Finally, we will also discuss ways to scope proposals so that we can continue to best serve our communities.
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From pets to wildlife and everything in between, Animals have a wonderful way of bringing a farm fully together. The Care and Keeping of Small Livestock will dive into the myriad of magical ways that animals can have a positive effect on your farm. Specifically we will cover how to select the right animals to incorporate into your homestead, or farm, for partnership, sustenance and/or support. We will get into the basic care of chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese and sheep, while spending more in depth time analyzing the care and keeping of one to two of these animals.
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In You Caught a Fish! Now what? we will get some hands-on experience practicing multiple ways to process a fish.
We'll chat about why you might want to prepare a fish one way, over another, and we will engage with ways to honor the life of the fish by using the fish in its entirety.
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We invite participants into the living wind-instrument traditions of the Andes, where music serves as a technology of land relationship, ceremony, and collective healing. Through storytelling and participatory song and sound-making with Jula Julas and Sicuri flutes, participants explore Indigenous Andean approaches to breath, interdependence, and ecological connection. Participants learn melodies traditionally used in planting, harvest, communal work, and rites of passage, experiencing how interlocking rhythms encode relationships to land, seasons, and community. No musical experience is required.