Since 2018, Groundwork has offered innovative environmental programming for people of all ages. This is an archive of our past projects. Some of these projects have wrapped up for good, and we hope that we will have the opportunity to bring others back. If you’re interested in any of these programs, please reach out!
Lithium Lands Fellowship
Nikki Hill envisioned this fellowship while working in remote parts of Nevada and eastern Oregon. She was meeting young people who were working in conservation and who were being educated in a system that promotes heavy use of herbicides as a precurser to restoration. The idea was that to restore something, you had to first wipe the slate clean. Nikki wanted to find a way to immerse young conservationists in the web of life that supports the land, complete with its histories of human tending. For 6 weeks in 2023, this cohort of fellows conducted plant surveys in the proposed Jindalee lithium mine site—what would be one of the largest open pit mines in North America. Along the way, the cohort met with tribal leaders and other ecologists doing field work. Nikki produced an incredibly detailed report of their findings.
Read more about the Lithium Lands Fellowship
Read the full report on the fellowship and their botanical surveys
Rooted In The Rockies
Jeff Wagner envisioned a program for adults that would immerse people in the ecologies, land management policy, and human/landscape relationships in Colorado and the greater American West. Meeting one weekend per month at different campsites, the program followed the seasons up into the mountains in the summer, and back to the valleys and plains in the fall, studying botany, ecology, water policy, food systems, and public lands, all with an eye towards how modernity has shaped Colorado. Rooted in the Rockies never found enough participants to run, but the dream is still there, and we would be excited to collaborate with teachers and organizations who could help bring this program to life.
Read more about Rooted In The Rockies
Seed, Soil, & Story Permaculture Design Course
This 2022 program was a 5-week permaculture design course on the Groundwork farm in Paonia, Colorado. The course included several days a week covering the standard curriculum for a permaculture design certificate, plus courses on cultural change and time spent working on Groundwork’s organic vegetable and seed farm studying the tensions in our modern food system between regenerative practices and the economic realities of small-scale organic farming.
Read more about Seed, Soil, and Story Permaculture Immersion
After The Anthropocene
After The Anthropocene was a 2-month online seminar focused on the idea of the Anthropocene—the era when humans have taken on a geologic-scale influence over the living and nonliving systems of Earth. The seminar combined academic reading and writing with creative practices (like writing, drawing, painting, photography, filmmaking, and audio production) to help participants envision how they might use their creative practices to help people understand our world in deeper and more complex ways. Angelica Calabrese taught this online course in the early months of 2022.
Read more about After The Athropocene
Front Yard Farming
In urban areas, access to good garden space is a privilege that many people don’t have. Front Yard Farming, a.k.a. the Neighborhood Garden Network, was a 2019-2020 project in Boulder, Colorado that recruited landowners to share their unused yard or garden space with those seeking garden space. In that city, community garden space is limited, and garden plots have long waitlists. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic starting right at the beginning of the 2020 gardening season, most landowners withdrew their offers, though the program still had success and could be a great model for other cities.