06 Sep starting a non-profit called Food Church

June 18 2024

After returning from Jordan Hot Springs thoroughly refreshed and re-energized, Aaron and I were sitting within the beautiful spiked canyon walls of the Middle Fork of the Gila River, at our summer-camp temporary home deep in the wilderness of western New Mexico. Finding ourselves very mentally clear after weeks of cleansing, and having spent the better part of the prior year staring into the unplanned abyss of latter 2024 and beyond;

Aaron shrugged at me and said, “Food Church?”

A recurring theme of our last for years has been a commitment to quality food sources in the direct day-to-day sense of our lives. We’ve given up living in major cities in favor of organic farms, and refocused our free time to learn extensively about growing plants, sustainable building, and water protection. “All I care about is food” is one of my frequent refrains to fellow work traders about why we transitioned into our current lifestyle. And the proof has been easy to see; Aaron and I are finding ourselves at peaks of our health both physically and mentally, and we credit that almost entirely due to our fresh food access (as well as an outdoor-based active lifestyle).

We’ve been seeking land to work into a sustainable food-forest haven, and in the process of searching for our own parcel we’ve met more and more people with similar, if not identical visions. We’ve come across homesteaders and hobby farmers with huge surpluses of their falling fruit, abundant veggie gardens, or huge medicinal bushes that they don’t know what to do with. We’ve been reassured time and again that the path forward through a doomed, climate-changing existence is quite simple: grow food, protect water, clean the air. We both already have enough freelance work to sustain our lifestyle, and feel that tending to the earth to aid in it’s natural desire for abundance should be outside the vein of commerce whenever possible.

So as we sat there in the Gila Wilderness, feeling incredibly grateful for this life path we’ve found and the people we’ve met, and finding ourselves with lots of time and few distractions — we decided it was time to form a non-profit; something that would act as a networking vehicle for all that want to share in growing food, knowledge and supplies. We wrote and researched for 8 days, created a website, and organized forms to file. On June 18th 2024, Food Church held its first founding board meeting with an initial two property holders, and applied for the IRS EIN #. Three days later on June 21st 2024 we filed more papers with New Mexico Secretary of State, and visited the bank to acquire a checking account so we’d be able to legally receive donations and provide tax write-offs to donators.

We are so excited for this next chapter in our semi-retired lives & ready to put the last few years of research and experimentation to the test! Our first properties to assess and help tend are both in New Mexico, allowing us to stay grounded in the new state that we love. We are also hoping to be able to spread the Food Church network globally, and aiming for more locations to visit over the coming winter (preferably warmer and souther ones!).

WHAT IS FOOD CHURCH?

Food Church is a mission of healing our planet one acre at a time, and in the process – healing ourselves. By utilizing permaculture and no-waste principles, following the designs of nature, Food Church aims to produce fresh food, living water, and clean air for its residents, volunteers, visitors, and enthusiasts around the world. Food Church believes our planet home of Earth is perfectly designed to provide these things when tended properly, and will display that theory in practice by following natural, organic, and permaculture models.

In short, Food Church believes:

• Everyone should have free access to clean air, living water, and fresh food
• The earth will and can provide everything needed to sustain human life when tended accordingly
• Water, as the source of all life, is itself a living entity, and should be treated accordingly
• Food Church believes in anti-waste, using already available resources and stacking functions.
• The human is a being created according to Nature’s laws and is therefore dependent upon them, thusly human culture should strive to comprehend and copy nature
• Food Church operates primarily outside of the scope of capitalism; and seeks to connect, acquire and distribute resources without using currency whenever possible.
• Food Church believes community is key to the success of the human species, and that the Arts are our gift to the world
• Food Church believes that all life should have the opportunity to thrive, not merely survive.

How it Works

Starting with donated or leased land, Food Church will usher in permaculture methodology to utilize the natural aspects & abilities of the land to its fullest.

The bounty provided by each property will be available for free through on-site harvest, or via on-site Free Store.

Why not distribute the free food harvests? Food Church strives to connect the local community to nearest available food sources and encourages on-site harvest as the primary access method. Members will be trained in sustainable harvest methods and thus able to consume food of the highest nutrient content possible.

Read more at Food-Church.org or contact Sarah & Aaron for more info!