10% Funded And Building!

When we made the commitment to create an outdoor school, the idea was a culmination of many years of taking ECO-Tourists out for day trips and a few overnights here and there where we would plant trees or native wild edibles, restore habitat and regenerate native plants where they had been lost. Sometimes for many decades the land had been abused and we learned many techniques for breathing life back into soil. When I was a young man, I had worked as an educator at College Settlement Camps of Philadelphia, teaching many of the same ideas and skills to young people, but as I continue to learn, many adults have never learned these important things either. As I have gotten older, the desire to start a sort of summer camp for all ages that would focus on not only rest and relaxation, but learning in a supportive and beautiful environment became my passion. I have never accepted a penny for my work in this regard. The pay offs for me come in ways that cannot be monetized. In fact, my life's savings are going into the pot as well as all the contributions that are coming in. Teaching about mutualism and the give back are far too important to hold hostage to money.
At the start of the global pandemic, I decided to change the way I thought about what I wanted to create and focused my effort on brining this outdoor school to fruition. Our group, ECO-Tours of Wisconsin, Inc. has begun to reach out to other groups, guest teachers who will share their skills and in an attempt to find the location for this new project, have poured over real estate listings for over a year. When we sold our property, more than three dozen wild edible plants filled the yard. The only real management required was to harvest some of nature's bounty each year and every few years, find others who we could give new shoots or cuttings, bulbs, corms or seeds. The profusion of life that sprung up under these plantings was amazing, the many hundreds of pounds of relatively free food we got to harvest was simply amazing and the soil these plants lived in matured as well, holding more nutrients, more water and more life than we could have imagined when we started. Now, we want to teach these same techniques to many hundreds, even thousands more people who come away to the wilds to experience first-hand what permaculture, carbon-smart farming and restoration biology can accomplish. Of course, it is not free or easy to bring together so many diverse groups and voices, so many skills and ideas into one experience, but we are on our way to doing so.
If you would like to manage your property in ways that give back to Mother Nature, that use no man-made chemicals, that revere rather than destroy natural systems, please contact us and/or contribute to our gofundme page. If you would like to learn how to store and sequester carbon in living soil, you can contact us as well. I will include a few photos of our gardens, but seeing them in person says more than the photos can capture. By teaching through actual experiences, rather than with just words, our students come away with skills and thought processes that help build community, honor the circular nature of life itself and to support diversity for the sake of all organisms involved.