Healing Foods After Incarceration + the Black Ecologies Garden in Humboldt

Why healing, food, and land belong together

The Ecotone Center for Land-Based Healing & Transformative Justice exists because we believe healing ourselves, our communities, and the land are interwoven processes. Rooted in healing justice, Black ecologies, and a politics of abolition, Ecotone cultivates spaces where people impacted by interpersonal and state violence can slow down, break bread, restore themselves, and practice new ways of being in the world. We take seriously the idea of ecotone—a border zone where different ecosystems meet in both tension and fertility—as a guiding metaphor for how we build abolition futures: by curating meeting grounds where differences become generative, not destructive, and where new communities can emerge.

Our first purpose—before anything else—is the curation of healing space with and for formerly incarcerated people finding a way forward in the aftermath of state violence. We are building a future beyond policing and prisons—grounded in care, connection, and the transformative power of the earth.

Food as punishment, and the violent separation from the earth

In U.S. prisons, food is often a tool of punishment. People inside are routinely subjected to unhealthy, low-quality meals, and many have limited to no access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Prisons are effectively food deserts—yet many incarcerated people come from communities already navigating food insecurity and health inequities. The result is compounded harm: poor nutrition, chronic illness, food-borne illness, diabetes, heart disease, and the deep psychological toll of being denied dignity at the most basic level of nourishment.

At the same time, prisons attempt to divorce people from land: from soil, from gardens, from weather and season, from the sensorial knowledge of growing and harvesting, from the more-than-human world that can remind us we belong. This separation is not incidental—it is part of how cages work. Healing cannot happen in a cage. When the body is controlled, movement is restricted, and the senses are starved, it becomes harder to remember one’s own agency, one’s own appetite for life, one’s own capacity to cultivate and be cultivated.

That is why, when people return home, repairing relationships to food and land becomes not only possible—but urgent. Ecotone’s work is grounded in the belief that returning citizens carry powerful knowledge, wisdom, and leadership potential for transforming our food systems and our communities. People most impacted by incarceration often have uniquely situated understandings of what the industrial food system does—how it disciplines, dispossesses, and dehumanizes—and what it could become instead.

Ecotone’s approach: land-based healing after incarceration

Ecotone curates land-based healing immersions that bring together food-as-medicine, cultural foodways, collective care, and transformative justice practices. Through retreats, workshops, and stewardships, we nourish a pipeline of formerly incarcerated leaders who can deepen movement capacity and help us imagine and build abolition ecologies—ways of living that make cages obsolete because we have learned to organize life around care.

Our spaces invite participants to reconnect with food not as punishment, but as relationship. Not as scarcity, but as abundance and shared responsibility. Not as shame, but as culture, memory, and survival. Participants are supported through embodied practices that help the nervous system settle after years of surveillance and deprivation, and through community-building that makes room for grief, joy, rage, and tenderness. Ecotone’s work insists that land is not backdrop—it is teacher, medicine, and witness.

This campaign: Healing Foods—A Black Foodways Retreat with Returning Citizens

Through this crowdfunding campaign, we are raising funds to host two iterations of Healing Foods: A Black Foodways Retreat with Returning Citizens. Black-identified returning citizens from across the Pacific Northwest will travel to Humboldt County for a three-day immersion into food justice and land-based healing.

Healing Foods is designed as both sanctuary and spark: a space to exhale, to be held, and to remember what it feels like to be in relationship with land, food, and community. Over three days, participants will engage in activities aimed at transforming their relationships with food and land, while also being introduced to pathways in regenerative agriculture and food-related careers. This includes hands-on learning with soil, cultivation, harvesting, and preparation—grounded in Black foodways and the history, creativity, and resilience they carry.

What your support makes possible: the Black Ecologies Garden + immersive programming

Funding from this campaign will directly support two connected needs:

• Completing the Black Ecologies Garden we are developing as a living classroom and healing site—an intentional space where participants can learn through touch, smell, taste, and shared work; where cultural foods and medicinal plants become entry points to memory, nourishment, and futures.
• Hosting retreat participants with care, including materials, facilitation, food, and the infrastructure needed to offer a meaningful immersion. This support allows us to create a retreat environment that is both grounded and spacious—one that honors the reality that many returning citizens have been denied safety, beauty, and rest for far too long.

By funding Healing Foods, you are helping build a model that is scalable and replicable: a program that demonstrates how healing relationships to food and involvement in agriculture can generate holistic health, strengthen reentry outcomes, and cultivate leadership for a more just and sustainable world. You are also investing in the truth that land can be a site of repair—and that returning citizens deserve not only survival, but transformation.