Greetings Friends……Little Artshram is at an exciting and re-energizing place of new beginnings as a non-profit organization.  The way we look at the end of summer and moving into the beginning of fall, is a time of readying for a new year.

Once we begin the harvesting process in our community (in our gardens, after a busy summer of programs and projects), we bring ourselves together around a table and complete our eco-design process of design or embodying this natural method of organization.  This not only means celebrating the harvest, but also composting that which needs to be, AND, tweaking with a feedback and evaluation process our next round of the cycle.

Our New Year begins in November, rather than January, and this year we are tweaking and seeking to expand and strengthen those who care to sit around the harvest table and join in with their voice and heart as a part of our organization.  Little Artshram calls this a circle of leaders, in legal terms it is called a board of directors and directress.

Currently Little Artshram has four devoted and hard-working, open-hearted official leaders and/or board members who have been tending to the month-to- month and organizational tasks: Rokko Jans, Flint Horton, and Lindy Barnes represent the board of directors/501.c3 needs being met.

Penny Krebiehl, the founder of Little Artshram, is the Directress, charged with the on-going task of developing and implementing art and permaculture programs and projects, including an Urban Farm Project and the annual Grand Traverse Earth Day Parade celebration.

Flint Horton has taken on this year’s position at the Historic Barns Park community garden as the coordinator, and continuing to set into motion the necessary community building operations of tending a garden site in a public owned park.

It’s time once again, for us to put the offer out into our Traverse City community to invite folks who have an interest in seeing our wonderful, little Little Artshram organization strengthened with your shared passion and interest in art, community gardening, and environmental education through the teachings and tools of Permaculture.

We are looking for people who are interested in setting down at our table, learning about our design process and system, and offering guidance and improvement.  In other words tweaking, and working with what we have, not re-inventing the wheel, so to speak.  Little Artshram has a 19 + year history of creatively responding to change and has been comprised of dozens of thoughtful, sensitive, hard-working, devoted, passionate individuals over the years.

In the past five years, our leaders and board members  have embraced Permaculture as a method by which we operate.  All of the board members and teachers at Little Artshram, once they accepted the position or shortly afterwards have either attended a permaculture design course, workshop or come to our table with a deep awareness and understanding.

We are knuckling-down, buckling down and searching for additional leaders, partners and board members who can contribute to regaining the foot-hand-heart hold of serving our Traverse City community with our wonderful, Little Artshram experiences, and not afraid to BLAST people with permaculture even in this instance!

Here’s a great natural system mimic as in a forest from one of our Edible Forest Garden teachers, Davejacke, where we are creating a pattern to give structure and organization to our Little Arthram system:

(excerpts and bits from EFG Volume 2)….”Dynamic Patches–in terms of disturbance, regeneration and maintenance regimes…..Patch-system theorists base their research on the observation that the fundamental organizational units of any ecosystem, at many different scales, are patches.  Patches derive from many environmental factors….also from the random or non-random influences of disturbances and the subsequent successional processes… Awareness is gained through observing/reading the factors contributing to different influences….which when read, we can design in concert with those with which we must and we can influence the rest effectively….”Structure and manage the garden as a set of overlapping, interconnected, and dynamic patches, each with its’ own influences, conditions, disturbance regime, and successional process. These patches, taken together, create the habitat for the garden.’

If you are interested in finding out more about joining Little Artshram, please contact any of the folks listed above for a personal conversation.

You may also directly email us at: info@littleartshram.org

Better yet, stop by a “Garden Party” fundraiser welcoming author and permaculture teachers Peter Bane and Keith D. Johnson on Friday, August 24th @ 6:00 pm, at the Peace Patch urban garden-farm site, corner of 7th and Oak St., in TC and speak to Little Artshram folk in person!

More information:

info@littleartshram.org

231-510-3491