Kilombo Tenondé: Where Forest, Food, and Culture Heal Together

Kilombo Tenondé: Where Forest, Food, and Culture Heal Together

Our Story: A Living Classroom of Ancestral Wisdom

Our project is rooted in a rural territory in Valença state of Bahia in Brazil. Over 20 years ago, this land was a degraded area, today, it is slowly transforming into a living mosaic of forest, food, and ancestral community learning.

Here, we are regenerating the soil and local biodiversity through agroforestry systems, community gardens, and ongoing efforts to reforest the native Atlantic Forest. At the same time, we are building spaces of autonomy and care for the families and visitors who live and work here. Our vision is to weave together reforestation, sustainable food production, and ancestral knowledge so that the land itself becomes a teacher for children, youth, and everyone who wishes to participate.

This work is guided by Mestre Cobra Mansa, the founder and land steward of Kilombo Tenondé. As a renowned master of Capoeira Angola, he has taught ancestral wisdom, body consciousness, Afro-Brazilian culture, and permaculture for decades. He created Kilombo Tenondé 20 years ago as a unique community space where capoeira, permaculture, agroforestry, and bioconstruction unite as daily practice and pedagogy. Under his leadership, the land is not only a site of ecological regeneration but also a living classroom where songs, stories, and movements keep the memory and cosmology of Black and Indigenous resistance alive.

Our Relationship with the Land

Today, we cultivate diverse agroforestry plots and organic gardens, and we are in the process of building a community meliponary for our native stingless bees.

As we restore the tree canopy and undergrowth, we are also experimenting with adding value to our local harvest. We enrich our cacao by producing artisanal chocolate, and we carefully extract essential oils from aromatic and medicinal plants such as tea tree (melaleuca), myrrh, wild rosemary, clove, lemongrass, and citronella. Our organic gardens and agroforests yield food and medicines like cacao, coffee, cupuaçu, traditional palm oil (dendê), cocoa butter, and dehydrated blue matcha (clitoria) flowers.

These activities are not just economic alternatives, they are ways to deepen our relationship with the forest, honor traditional practices, and create dignified livelihoods that do not depend on deforestation or chemical inputs.

How We Will Use the Funds

With your support, we want to deepen this work in three main ways:

• Expand agroforestry and strengthen sustainable food systems: The funds will help us improve and expand our planted areas, nurture the soil, and maintain a diverse canopy of fruit, native, and medicinal species. This will also help us create a more resilient physical infrastructure for our community learning days and workshops.
• Implement a bio-input (compost and fertilizer) system: In the rural interior of Brazil, finding suppliers for organic inputs like compost and bio-fertilizers is a major challenge. We want to start producing our own localized bio-inputs by building a worm farm (vermicomposting), cultivating castor beans to produce organic castor cake fertilizer (torta de mamona), and safely utilizing the compost generated from our dry ecological toilets.
• Establish a native plant nursery: We want to build a larger nursery to propagate native seedlings. This will directly support our reforestation and agroforestry planting efforts, while also serving as a vital economic alternative so that people in our community can generate income while restoring the forest.

The Future We Are Growing

Our territory faces many of the pressures common to rural communities in Brazil: soil degradation, limited access to supportive public policies, a lack of contextualized educational opportunities, and the constant risk of rural exodus, especially among our youth.

At the same time, there is a strong culture of cooperation, a growing agroforestry tradition, and a deep commitment to staying on the land in a regenerative way. By investing in this reforested, food-producing, and culturally vibrant landscape, you help us prove that it is possible to heal the soil, produce healthy food, and build a future where people, the forest, and ancestral culture can thrive together.