Combine learning with service at our Pay-it-Forward Medicine Making and Solidarity Medicine Making workshops!
Discover the satisfying and empowering experience of creating plant medicine to share with the people and communities who need it most!
In these hand-on workshops, we make large batches of a variety of herbal remedies while focusing on teaching a wide array of medicine making skills. Participants learn new skills and recipes, and the greater community benefits as well by receiving batches of sweet, sweet herbal medicine! The medicines we craft are donated to the free clinics or gifted to communities in the form of care packages or HerbCare Stations. Over the years through these workshops we have also supported direct actions such as Standing Rock, the Apollo House Occupation, and the J-20 Defendants.
Herbal medicine is the people’s medicine and when we craft it together, we build a stronger and more resilient community!
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Upcoming Classes
Atlanta
See our Events + Classes Page
Dublin
See the HerbShare Dublin Page
A little history…
When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, Lorna had a medicine making workshop scheduled that weekend. The original plan was to spend the day making remedies that were both tasty and healthy to support our friends and family during the winter season. It was an all day workshop and we thought, we have all these crafty hands that we can surely take a little time at the end of class and put them to work, creating a care package for the folks in NYC. And why not direct some of the funds folks paid to take the class towards purchasing the supplies? So for the last hour of class, we made a dozen lavender sachets and created hundreds of winter tulsi chai blend teabags (warming and soothing) to send up north. It touched something extra special inside of us all.
Flash forward 2 years, the Herb Bus is now on the scene and we are doing our best to make the Herbalista Free Clinic a sustainable project. But, as we all know, free clinics aren’t really “free”, they cost money to stock and money to run. So remembering that earlier Sandy Workshop, we thought what better solution than to literally put the community to work, stocking the bus! We could spent the day learning and making the remedies we use most in clinic. The registration fees purchased the herbal ingredients and by the end of class everyone had acquired new skills and the Bus had new medicines!! And so Pay-it-Forward Medicine Making was born!
You can find recipes, medicine making instructions and example class outlines and packing lists on the website. Please check out the Toolkit if you are interested in using this model to create herbal infrastructure in your neck of the woods.
We run these workshops not only to stock the clinics in Atlanta, but most recently used them to build the apothecary for the Dublin Herb Bike and Cork Herb Bike projects. We also run Solidarity Medicine Making Workshops to send to other communities who need our help, just like that first care package we sent to New York City!