We are the Garden
A workshop inviting interdisciplinary creative action through the Art for Climate Resilience Program
On April 19th, 2025 a group of people gathered. Some were speakers, hosts, artists, activists, and community developers yet all gathered. Gathered in curiosity for an event that invited interdisciplinary thought with a promise of art, impact, and more.
Garden of Us was an invitation to the community. We began, as with any good project, with a foundation. The foundation we built upon was knowledge cultivated by experts, each representing a topic central to the larger Art for Climate Resilience program, Indigenous Wisdom, Environmental Justice, and Food Resilience. With Carol Burton from Urban Harvest, Ed Pettitt, MPH a Graduate Research Assistant at Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice and President of Friends of Columbia Tap, and community environmental health advocate, Alicia Fontenot formerly at Texas Children in Nature Network, the panelists brought a diverse range of awareness and expertise to distilling these topics to the audience.
For those who didn’t take the journey with us that day, the questions the speakers were asked weren’t simply to define these terms for the group, but what it meant to them. It’s a question we should all ask ourselves:
What do Indigenous wisdom, environmental justice, and food sovereignty mean to me?
How can this knowledge shape how I engage with others, the community, and myself?
Ultimately, how can I integrate this knowledge into my life?
Yet, we didn’t stop there.
The entire program and workshops are designed through a lens accumulated through lived experience, research, and my academic background in International Nutrition and arts-in-health practice weaving and intersecting this program’s themes with the awareness that in addressing resilience, we must understand the adversity that has come before. We can all speak of the things we want, but if we can’t feel the embodiment of them then the words fall short. It’s about acceptance and the decision that while healing takes place both in the community and self, we can choose to align with a healthier future through today’s choices in the seeds we plant in the garden of our collective environment.
Each workshop and the entire program is designed with trauma-informed, somatic awareness, mindfulness, futurism, and arts-in-health integrated into the design.
We went from the foundation to integration with an interactive table session with speakers exploring the past, present, and future.
In community coming together we brought imagination into complexity exploring what it could look like in a future rooted in care, creativity, and collective resilience.
So where exactly did the art part start? *rhyming very much intentional*
It started as soon as they walked in the door. Sticky notes, markers, and pens were on every table inviting not only engagement but processing tools for all minds.
With an art activity paired with a futurism exercise called Three Horizons, we explored and drew the viable futures we wanted to see. The stories are still unfolding and that’s where we will continue. With each workshop, we’ll co-create art together as a community creating a cumulative zine integrative of the workshop teachings, activities, and the stories we carry forward to impart community health and resilience.
Garden of Us called artists, educators, youth, local chefs, gardeners, and community members to learn, envision, and create together. It was a glimpse into the unfolding vibrancy of the Art for Climate Resilience program, which is taking place from April to September 2025 in Houston, Texas.
Want to co-create with us? Join us on July 20th for an in-person zine creation workshop at 12:00 PM CST exploring zine-making.
Come ready to share, imagine, and dig in. Let’s plant the seeds of community-rooted climate resilience — and watch them grow.