Feeling a dissonance between the life your family and community are living and the life we could or should be living? Fearing a future world of out-of-control global warming, increasing disasters, a loss of natural beauty and diversity and a growing gap between the rich few and the poor many? Are you feeling called to gather people of your faith community together to seek the Kingdom of God in a practical, moral and loving way in this time of global crisis?

If these questions resonate with you, then the God's Increase Seed Initiative of Agricultural Missions may be able to support your vision.

Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI) can share with your congregation, outreach, buildings and grounds or stewardship committee, intentional community, women or men's group, youth group, community advocacy organization, or youth camp program with tried and proven activities, approaches and models that are working across the country, in places like St. Louis, Missouri, Oberlin, OH, East Brooklyn, NY. The growing national movement toward local food consumption is taking myriad forms and winning strategies are being championed, and new forms of organizing devised, growing what we call a solidarity economy.

We at AMI find that more than anything, what matters in rebuilding and strengthening community life is an integrated, practical and collective approach to organizing and to shared community work and play. And we think that faith communities are natural places for true interdependent and self-reliant community to be revived.

AMI can work with your group step by step, providing guidance, suggestions and ideas, and if necessary providing training in both the practicalities of gardening and in organizing techniques. We have experience ranging from mobilizing for farm worker campaigns such as the Alliance for Fair Food working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, to the nitty gritty work of running a gardening camp and, indeed, initiating a community garden where there is only sod or weeds on some vacant lot or church lawn.

How much will it cost? AMI staff will do the initial consultations by phone/email for free, as part of the ministry of our organization. If we are nearby, we will do so for mileage reimbursement. Subsequent visits, educational events, trainings, assessments and other follow up activities can be negotiated. Our basic concept curriculum is available for a small fee.*(to be adapted to your situation)

AMI can help you get started and accompany your work until you have the tools and experience necessary to become autonomous and self-sustaining, until you become yet another of those places around the country instilling hope for the next generation to inherit this broken world.

Find nourishment as part of a group of gardeners, organizers and cooks! Life will never look the same again!

Peace through Justice,

Stephen Bartlett
Coordinator for Education and Advocacy
Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI)
502 896 9171 in Louisville
sbartlett@ag-missions.org
NY Office: 212 870 2553

Appendix: Examples of Experiences Click Here

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Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI) has since 1930 worked with rural peoples’ organizations and communities to defend a healthy agriculture on the land, enjoyed equitably as a part of natural and diverse human cultures.  AMI is in the irrigation ditches, terraces, orchards, and forests (not to mention the occasional press conference and board room) with organizations across the country and the world trying to promote and defend what profound experience tells us is the most sustainable, just and healthy form of agriculture.  While rural people, especially youth, continue to leave the life of farming due to hostile economic models, inhuman economies of scale and the political drive toward monopoly control by agribusiness under an increasingly industrialized and unhealthy agriculture, communities everywhere are seeking ways to reconnect to and exert appropriate control over food production, processing and distribution, in the creating of a solidarity economy with the potential for reviving hope and health.

Be part of that movement with us at AMI.
 

FOOD: A Justice Issue

Children's Gardening Day Camp

Linking Community Groups

Rural Justice Tours

Want to walk

on the wild side of the soil? 

Give us a Ring!

AMI can work with

your group step by

step, providing

guidance, suggestions

and

ideas, and if

necessary providing training in both the

practicalities of

gardening and in

organizing techniques.

Distributed by

AGRICULTURAL MISSIONS, INC.

475 Riverside Drive

New York, NY 10115

www.agriculturalmissions.org