The old moniker GANG (Green Acres Neighborhood Garden) was officially discarded a few years ago. It was a gradual process, our realization that our garden had now folded itself into community. Our community. An intentional community, what we have been nurturing all along through working the garden together as neighbors since 2009! The changeover was both subtle and blatant. Subtle, because it’s very hard to pinpoint when exactly it happened. Blatant, in that it’s no longer a Neighborhood Garden per se, though neighbors are of course welcome to come work the soil with us, and take home a few veggies in exchange — or not!
And we’ve gone through various iterations of the new name, too. We moved from GANG to GAV, Green Acres Village; then, once we did a CSA (in 2016, and again in 2018), we called it Green Acres Village and Urban Farm; then, wrestling with that long name, we came up with Green Acres Permaculture Village instead, which puts the notion of permaculture right in the title — so obviously working with both each other AND the land, without having to say so. Or in permaculture lingo, we are doing both land-based permaculture and social/cultural permaculture, together, synchronized in harmony.
Our motto says it all, “Building Community from the Ground Up.” For the past few years, that has included weekly Community Dinners, where we invite neighbors, friends, old and new, to join us, rotating among our three homes, and sometimes even having presentations of various kinds — aesthetic, cultural, educational, after dinner.
It’s a rich, full life we lead here.
For more on our village life, see www.greenacresvillage.org. For more from the founder, Ann Kreilkamp, see www.exopermaculture.com.