We formed Seeds of Hope in response to the economic conditions here in Nicaragua.
We have two objectives:
1. To produce unskilled employment that pays a living wage.
2. To identify crops that are in demand in the international markets, find buyers, develop organic growing methods and teach farmers to grow these crops. The goal with this is to provide small farms with more profitable crops.
Helping farmers here, involves demonstrating the approach and techniques on a functional farm. Once individuals can see the results we then coming alongside them to help them produce those same results.
We observed this with growing Turmeric – the proof was in the harvest!
Helping people to experience themselves as living bodies on a living earth . . . is necessary in achieving any solution to the problems we all face . . . Only with the bodily experience of power and compassion will people have the courage and the desire and the ability to undertake what must be done to heal the planet.
Paul Linden
We are committed to growing crops organically and to only grow crops that do not produce social or environmental problems.
One approach we are utilizing is community resource mapping. Which is evaluating within the communities what resources are there.
By doing the production mainly by manual methods we are able to hire the greatest number of people. Automation and large equipment might increase our bottom line, however, it will not meet our objective of producing the greatest number of jobs.
None of us can predict when the causes we support will capture the public imagination, and our once-lonely quests become popular crusades.
Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen