Refuge, Restoration and Sustenance
Drinking Gourd is a Black-led community, stewarding a ten-acre farm and spiritual center.
Our Mission
Drinking Gourd is a Black-led community initiative committed to land stewardship, food justice, and spiritual restoration.
Through farming, ceremony, and community care, we work to grow and share healthy food with communities in Oakland that have historically been excluded from access to nourishing food. At the same time, we cultivate spaces where people can reconnect with land, plants, ancestors, and the healing wisdom of the natural world.
Our work centers communities that rarely have access to rest, retreat, or land-based healing spaces.
Generations Rising
A mentorship and apprenticeship initiative dedicated to youth, formerly incarcerated persons, frontline workers, and those transitioning from foster care. Here, farming is metaphor and practice; freedom is cultivated in the soil, in the community, in the self.
Seed & Soil Circle
Communal gatherings where we learn from the earth, from the ancestors, from one another. We share seeds, stories, songs, and cultivate our relationship with the living world.
Sacred Ritual & Community Altars
Seasonal festivals, music, storytelling, and movement practices where our spiritual traditions (both inherited and emergent) meet land, culture, and collective imagination.
Harvest & Healing Pathways
Workshops, retreats, and community gatherings that integrate land-based labor with embodied reflection—so that the act of growing becomes the act of healing.
They said the sky was not a ceiling, but a map …
How can we change the world?
When you give, you are not donating — you are joining the congregation of care. Your offering becomes part of the sacred cycle: land tending, healing work, food distribution, and ceremonies that remind us that God, the Ancestors, and the Earth walk with us in reciprocity.