Cultivating Place

Sometimes unexpected paths lead us to stay–and grow–in a place we thought we were leaving. This week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa talks about staying at home, with Charity Stowe, founder of Herstoric Development & Milkweed Commons in South Bend, Indiana. Charity’s journey back to South Bend began with a house she planned to renovate and sell. But what started as a real estate project grew into something much more: a commitment to the community and the neighborhood she found herself calling home. Listen in - this week! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you’ll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can’t thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Seeds are essential not just to our gardens but to life on this planet across time and space. Seeds and humans have partnered since humans have walked on two feet. This week on Cultivating Place, we are in conversation with Mike Bollinger, Executive Director of Seed Savers Exchange, celebrating the history and agency of individuals saving seeds. Founded in 1975 by Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, SSE is one of the largest non-governmental seed banks in the world, focused on preserving open-pollinated, heirloom crop seeds and education, and Mike shares so much more about SSE moving forward and all that we save and grow when we steward seeds well! PS: Mike is also host of Seed Savers Exchange’s new podcast, Sowing Connections. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Many of the systems that run our world, let alone garden our world, are built-sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently-to discourage and disincentivize regenerative growing and regenerative thinking. Mark Lewis is a human who learned from gardening, and ultimately from running a 354-acre regenerative organic farm, how to live into his regenerative values. Gardening and regenerative farming also demonstrated to him that if we want those values to really root in our world, we need to apply those values to some of our larger systems – like the economics of our world. As a co-founder and managing partner at Trailhead Capital, he believes there are many pathways to regeneration, and we need them all. Mark joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his journey and his regenerative thinking. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Kai Wright is a gardener, but chances are good you know him as a Peabody Award-winning host, editor, and longtime journalist whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity. He is co-host of The Guardian’s new video podcast: Stateside with Kai and Carter, a current events program "striving to make sense of it all". Kai’s garden history and practice help ground him in all that sense-making. And we could all use more good sense. Listen in this week! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

For the next conversation in our intermittent series on what regenerative cultivation looks like in our world-at many levels, Cultivating Place is speaking this week with Dr. Garrett Liles, cofounder and faculty affiliate of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico. The Center is all about caring cultivation of place, understanding and supporting better systems, and training the next generation in the ethos and the practices. The Center is directed by nationally recognized regenerative agriculture leader, Dr. Cynthia Daley, an educator, researcher, and advocate, who joined CSU Chico’s faculty in 1998. Between 2016 and 2019, Dr. Daley, along with Dr. Tim LaSalle and Dr. Garrett Liles, created the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems. Today, the Center is a nationally respected hub for interdisciplinary research, producer education, student engagement, and policy outreach. Dr. Liles has been mentored by and is a colleague of Dr. Daley and Dr. LaSalle, expanding on and adding to the longstanding work of sustainable agricultural practice at Chico State–past, present, and future-for the benefit of all people and places. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.