Ministry Update – Living Earth Center

The possibilities of springtime and sunshine call to everyone in different ways. At Living Earth Center, a ministry of School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND), it is the undeniable pull of getting back into the garden for a new growing season. In addition to the freshly blooming flowers, tomatoes, cucumbers and green beans, sprouting alongside more exotic offerings of sagaa and managu, the organization itself prepares to embrace a new season of its own continued growth.

“I’ll stand on my soapbox and say even though community gardens aren’t going to solve all the problems, they can be a start for a lot of the challenges we are facing,” said Laura Marsala Peterson, executive director of Living Earth Center. “Community growing spaces are this really interesting and organic way to bridge the gaps of divide. It’s my goal to see if we can be a part of helping communities start these spaces because I do think that they have positive reverberations.”

Rooted at “The Hill” at Our Lady of Good Counsel in Mankato, Minnesota, additional growing spaces, initiatives and programs of Living Earth Center continue to expand. At the center of it all though are three key aspects—connection with the land, connection with each other and access to healthy food.

To achieve this, Living Earth Center offers various programs and opportunities. There is their emerging growers program, providing the larger spaces needed for those looking to grow food not just for themselves, but for their wider community. This past year, the growers were able to sell produce to food shelves at market value and be paid through a local food purchasing grant with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Living Earth Center hopes to continue this in the future and also offer technical training options for growers to sell produce within the local food economy.

“What’s fascinating about this is a lot of the crops that these emerging growers grow are culturally relevant crops,” said Laura. “You can’t find them other places and so you can get good market value.”

In addition, 120 individual community gardeners and their families are well into the process of planting their own gardens in space at Living Earth Center—growing fruits, herbs, vegetables and flowers for their own personal use.

Add to that the multiple additional partnerships, classes, gardens created onsite at apartment complexes and school and youth-based programs, and the incredible scope and impact of the center begins to take shape.

“Community growing spaces solve a lot of community-based challenges,” said Laura. “You can actually connect the dots of how having access to healthy food, if you can get it easily, means you’re more likely to eat it. Having access to being outside, moving your body, having your hands in the soil have positive individual impact. It’s a great organic antidote to the loneliness epidemic.

“We know that when people come out to these growing spaces, suddenly they are engaging with people that they wouldn’t normally. Maybe they don’t have the same socioeconomic background, maybe they don’t have the same religious background. Maybe they don’t even speak the same language. But something magical happens in the garden that creates this equal space in which all is fair in love and tomato growing. The same sun shines down on all the growers and for me it really exemplifies that concept of connection, of connection without question.”

Knowing the positive impacts of this work, the Living Earth Center has been active in securing a forever home and evaluating how to further expand its reach.

“We’d like to be able to grow larger so that we can provide more opportunity,” said Laura. “We are being intentional about securing space for long-term stewardship.”

No matter where else the seedlings of Living Earth Center sprout, the influence of SSND remains at its heart.

“We take the legacy of the sisters seriously. So much of what Living Earth Center is doing is —to put it in the seed metaphor —is creating the seedlings of care and connection and justice that these sisters have been working on for so long. The legacy that we are continuing is literally being cultivated in the soil and my hope is that cultivation can last for generations.”