Who’s behind Food Church
Food Church was created by a small group of extraordinary individuals whose professional, educational, and real-world experiences provide a broad, solid foundation for creating community and enriching the earth. Collectively, their qualifications include degrees & certifications in environmental science, permaculture, design science, anti-waste systems design, natural building, and business economics.
“If you can’t buy food this fresh, then it should be FREE.”
Meet the Food Church Founders:
Lead Visioneers: Aaron & Sarah
This couple has been shaking things up together since 2011. After over two decades attempting to wade through traditional service and office career paths, they both found a new calling brought on with an urgency only a global pandemic could spark: food and water security. The supply chains of our most basic resources are likely to become more and more threatened in the face of growing global unrest and environmental shifts. The Visioneers seek to increase availability of and access to the purest and healthiest forms of air, food and water resources.
Aaron & Sarah have spent several years traveling, studying, and testing various natural methods for tending to plants, trees, water, and soil. They’ve been living simply, seeking farmland to help tend, and eating off the land as much as possible ever since. Cooking with unique seasonal ingredients, harvesting daily, and feeling their internal health grow balanced, firm, reliable, the Visioneers kept commenting “we eat better than most people. In fact you can’t really even buy food of this nutrient quality, this fresh.”
Many of their favorite harvests were from trees and plants bursting with so much it was difficult to keep up. They learned scads of new useful and edible foragable plants. It seemed clear that the Earth can and does produce endless bounty for humanity, and is our greatest teacher.
Through traveling and studying, the Visioneers began to meet more and more people with the same notions of natural food production and water protection. With uncertain climate events on the horizon, the Visioneers realized it was foolish to bank on a single location for the next several decades, and realized what was more important was a network. With mounting passion for this goal, on 06/18/24, the Visioneers launched Food Church: the first, hopefully of many, natural sanctuaries offering free food, living water, and clean air.
Permaculture Visioneer: Bennett
Bennett is a dedicated, inspiring land steward with over ten years experience in Permaculture design, rainwater harvesting, and ecosystem restoration, primarily in the landscapes of the Southern Rockies. He is a founding member of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, the Denver Permaculture Guild, and an active member of the Food Forest Movement.
With a background in environmental science, natural building, and the culinary industry, Bennett strives to integrate the restoration of thriving ecosystems into local food economies and facilitate the bioregional conversation in Northern New Mexico and across the Southwest.
Bennett’s unwavering dedication to these global and local efforts was an integral spark that inspired Aaron and Sarah to create Food Church. Together they work to bring greater coherence to the regenerative movement and encourage the flourishing of agroecosystems through networks of mutual aid.
Values Visioneer: Lindsey
“Hunkered down in the Southern California pandemic lockdown, I acquired an intense craving to find a Haven – a place of regeneration for myself, others and the silent nations who would be my neighbors. That is how I came to begin Googling ‘cheap land’. Luckily, before Covid hit the US – I had the immense fortune to land in what would be the last immersion Permaculture Design course at Starhawk’s NorCal property before lockdown! Without that experience, I wouldn’t have had the practical framework and the confidence to acquire raw land on top of a mountain in New Mexico and begin dreaming it into an off-grid Haven!
In 2016, I began to live in service and so of necessity, but by choice and design, the reality of the hillside Selah lives, since the spring of 2022, as a replicable template for anyone to build a Haven of extremely limited monetary resources, Earth materials and in honoring Mother Earth’s patient sacrifice for us, many reclaimed materials.
So enters the blessing of Food Church. Without help and a regenerative, indigenous, systems-based way of tending water, recycling waste and growing food and medicine – there would be no Haven!
Cheers to the many more of you who endeavor to welcome back into your spaces, the natural systems which create abundance for all, regeneratively without fail!
And Cheers to those Earth keepers who would come along to share in the celebration by helping to grow and Keep those spaces!
Cheers to us all in this new era of food and water and life sovereignty!”
– Lindsey