Our Vision
1. Offer camps for all through kinship and nature’s lens, with safe spaces for youth, women and marginalized peoples, that focus on farming, seeds & food sovereignty.
2. Use a S.T.E.A.M. approach to engaging people in living soil, healthy rivers and carbon sequestration through sustainable agriculture and seed harvesting.
3. Grow bulk contract seeds for communities, taking into consideration cultural needs and traditions, to help meet their seed stock needs.
4. Create safe spaces for the voices of youth to be heard.
5. Share our vision of circular kinship, that all life is connected and holds a link in the chain of resilient communities — be they human, and all other life in the soil, up in the sky or in the waters.
Our Mission
1. Offer S.T.E.A.M based camps that focus on farming, seeds, gardening, food sovereignty through nature's lens.
2. We believe that youth are essential in generating ideas for the future and create safe space for their voices to be heard.
Our goals
1. To engage youth and their families in citizen science with S.T.E.A.M summer camps; 2. To offer programming in minority languages; 3. Encourage Sustainable Recreation practices through Bilingual Services; 4. Engaging local youth in scientific and environmental STEAM camps that encourage stewardship of cultural and natural resources; 5. Facilitating active learning about the biological function of healthy and unhealthy soil and water; 6. Teach remediation techniques using living soil, no-till and permaculture techniques; 7. To better understand the impact of agriculture along the river and riparian edge and which shrubs and trees contribute to its health;
Our Values
Seeds and food
1. We remove the barrier for a community to have their traditional seeds grown out and shared. One of our most sacred values is to grow-out varieties of seeds for communities that would like to increase their seed stocks.
2. Act as a seed library to protect the seed stocks of various communities and share this diversity with them when they are in need of replenishment of these resources.
3. All members will have access to the seeds in our care, unless specifically stated otherwise by the communities that originally shared the seeds.
4. Seeds are part of the kinship circle of relationships that we wish to honor, tend, and listen to.
Youth Camps
1. Give youth opportunity to meaningfully engage with other citizens through art and science: Biology, soil analysis, video & photo, Digital Arts, Dance, Music, Graphic arts & agriculture
2. Offer summer camps for local youth on all parts of the spectrum – who just want to play, co-create and learn.
3. Safe and structured spaces for participants to engage with the mission and vision of the non-profit.
4. Offer at least 1 event at the farm for Adults and families to engage with the project.
5. Increase farm stewardship activities to the general public
Education
1. Cultivate seed growing, care, harvesting and proper storage techniques.
2. Cultivate seed variety preservation techniques and how to reduce cross-pollination.
3. Share (when appropriate) the stories of the people who preserved the seeds before they came to Le Noyau and were grown on the farm.
4. Cultivate the sharing of the multiple uses of plants - food sources, clothing sources, creative and cultural uses and spiritual uses - with permission from the communities that shared them.
5. Cultivate the importance of pollinators in our systems and how to protect them.
6. Cultivate the importance of living soil, healthy water and all the relatives within it.
7. We believe that all people, regardless of their level of ability or their current or past mental health, need adapted access to learning about biodiversity, seeds, farming and pollinators.
8. We believe that socio-economic status must not be a barrier to learning the above stated values and will offer sliding scales to our members.
9. Learn on an on going basis and recognize that learning happens in both individual and group contexts.
Learning from the red road
Our Board
Iekwirahawi Holly McComber, from Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, has dedicated over 30 years to environmental protection and education, beginning her career as a Conservation Officer and continuing her commitment through her work with the Kahnawake Environment Protection Office. She also served...
Ceta Gabriel, otherwise known as SimpliCita, is a Yoga asana, health, and spiritual wellness practitioner, a multi- disciplinary artist, writer, community advocate and student of life. Her love of beauty in excellence, the arts, dance, music and culture add to her ability to transcend systemic interpersonal obstacles with creativity...
Alexandre Charlton is the co-founder and Director of Operations of Cavaletti, an organization he helped build since 2016 around human and innovative interventions focused on well-being and the human-animal relationship.
Trained by recognized experts including Roger Deslauriers, Gérard Fontaine and Rupert Isaacson...
Bio to come