Seeds of Solidarity

Our Solidarity Medicine Making Workshops began when Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, devastating Coney Island and Far Rockaway. A community medicine making workshop had already been scheduled for that weekend in Atlanta and we wondered how we could help.

The focus for the workshop was winter wellness and we planned on crafting an array of tasty remedies, from spiced pear brandy to warming winter teas. With so many crafty hands gathered in one place, surely we could take a little time at the end of class to create a care package for the folks in NYC. We stretched the supplies fees to cover additional herbs and spent the last hour of class, making dozens of Lavender sachets and packs of Winter Tulsi Chai teabags to send up north. 

That day touched something extra special inside us all.

Once the Herb Bus hit the scene a couple months later, we started having the typical free clinic struggles. How do we make a free clinic sustainable? How do we find creative ways to support our programming? We remembered our Hurricane Sandy Workshop and thought – what better solution than to ask our community to help us with the stocking of the free clinic.

We started scheduling workshops to make the remedies that we were running low on in clinic. The registration fees folks pay into the class will purchase the herbal ingredients and by the end of class everyone would have acquired new skills and the Bus would have acquired new medicines. It was a win-win. At that time we called the workshops Pay-It-Forward Medicine Making, but once we started offering these same workshops at our Health Fairs (where no money exchanges hands) it seemed time to change the name to Solidarity Medicine Making.

Our Solidarity workshops, along with the Grow-a-Row Program, create the pillars upon which our community-based model of care is built. Here is an early herb-flow chart from 2015 where we try to show the how all our program works together to uplift our community. Notice that everything doesn’t only flow in one direction. Things flow back and forth.

For example, the growers don’t just donate their herbs to be turned into medicine bound for clinics. They also have the chance to learn to make medicines at our workshops, so they can create their own value-added products and hopefully increase their personal economic viability. When people attend the Medicine Making Workshops they can become inspired to make more medicines of their own and hopefully then purchase herbs from local farmers who are participating in the Grow-a-Row program to buy from. Ultimately, we hope that by growing, making, and sharing herbal medicine we all find greater health and happiness.