We Are Reimagining the Village and Need Your Support

Help us raise $100,000 to support our expansion and vision for the future.

My name is Kikanza Ramsey-Ray and I am the founder, director, and one of the lead teachers at Village Playgarden and Wildseed Regenerative Farm; a developmentally lead Waldorf inspired early childhood community, childcare, and farm forest kindergarten. After years as a frontlines community organizer in the struggle for social justice, I became a Waldorf early childhood educator as an addition to my commitment to working toward a better world. With my family of 7; including my 87 year old grandmother, mother, husband , and three children, we set out to create a magical safe space to educate and care for young children and their families. 13 years ago I birthed this dream to call together a multigenerational intentional community in order to serve humanity through all of the stages of development starting with our youngest humans.  Village Playgarden is our flagship program. We offer a rich land based early childhood experience for children 2 through 6 years old in the traditions of Lifeways Waldorf early childhood education, anti-biased/anti-racist curriculum, nonviolent conscious parenting, place based education, and regenerative farming.  Our land is also home to Arising Homeschool Collective supporting homeschooling middle schoolers co-founded by Adalila Zelada Hopkins; Mountainside summer wilderness program; and a host of enrichment offerings to parents and people of all ages.  We are living, farming, and creating on three campuses on sacred Tongva land, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Altadena California, which is the multi-acre land base of our two early childhood homes, Wildseed Farm, and our forest kindergarten.

After 13 successful years, Village Playgarden, Wildseed Regenerative Farm and all of its’ programs are at a crossroads. Covid-19 global pandemic stopped our rich in person programming for 7 months, stopped our tuition based income, and caused an economic crisis in our work. Our response has been to come back even stronger in our commitment to build equitable, just, and multigenerational sustainable community from the roots up. To that end, we invested our savings, bartered and borrowed to rebuild enough all outdoor Covid conscious infrastructure to get the doors re-opened.  Our re-opening has been a healing experience where children, though needing to observe Covid safety, have been able to have developmentally supportive experiences where they can thrive at a time when so many children have lost their communities of children, and been forced to try to learn on digital platforms.

We now need your support for the additional infrastructure that is necessary to reimagine the Village and run our programs 100 % outdoors so we can continue to be a place where children and their families can learn, grown, create, and build community that is deeply socially connected. Your donation will save the Village, protect and transform its programming, and support the expansion of our work as a model for conscious community building.

Urban Barn Raising For Our Farm Forest School and Community

What your contribution will support:

• We need to purchase all weather tensiled roofs and outdoor heaters for cooler temperatures, rain, and sun. As the new infrastructure was built with donated labor, deferred payments, and just enough bones to get the program open, there are necessary finishing touches that we need immediately. 
• We need one more storage shed and one more composting toilet in the Forest School. In our commitment to environmental sustainability, we have built composting toilets in the Village Playgarden Skylane yard. We ran out of funds and steam to build a composting toilet in the Forest School, and so have been using a port-o-potty.  The children in the forest class need their own composting toilet and a storage shed for their cubbies and belongings.  
• We need the funds for licensing, zoning, and modest remodeling of the new Canon Trail house, Village’s new site. We are in the enrollment period of new families for the upcoming school year, and have received enough applicants to fill all three sites. This will at least double the amount of families that we serve.  In addition to meeting the high demand from families who want the quality early childhood experience and care that Village Playgarden has provided for the past 13 years; increasing the enrollment is a significant element of our ability to survive.  
• We need funds to protect and increase living wage compensation for teachers. We brought back all of our teachers in our reopening, and have worked to maintain salaries, raises, and offer benefits. In addition, with the expansion, our faculty and staff will increase significantly. We are committed to validating and honoring the work of teachers and early childhood caregivers, a profession that is dominated by women and people of color, in ways that are not typically financially protected in our society.  
• We need funds to sustain the increased staffing. We hired four new full time and part-time teachers, a part time admin assistant, a bookkeeper, and a cook/director of the Farm to Table Healthy Food Program. We are required to have a larger than normal ratio in order to keep small “podded” groups of children as part of the state’s mandated Covid protocols. This raises our budget and expenses significantly. In addition, our growth is a source of providing a living wage job and career that offers, training and professional development, a noble profession, and a peaceful respectful place to work.  
• We need funds to continue our commitment to professional development for all of our teachers so that we can lead a quality farm forest all outdoor program rooted in Waldorf early childhood education and the values of equity, inclusion, diversity, anti-racism, justice, and nonviolence. 
• We need funds to launch an Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, and Justice Scholarship Fund, and continue to grow the work of inclusion as rooted in the original vision and work of Kikanza and Geoff when founding Village Playgarden. We are committed to specific diversity and inclusion goals, and are working to deepen these values so that they are at the institutional and structural level at Village Playgarden, living in our community culture and composition beyond the ideas, hopes, and aspirations of Geoff and Kikanza. We would like the entire Village community to help support the cost of making sure that categories of diversity are protected and that includes making sure that there are financial resources available to simultaneously fund the cost of the program while at the same time make sure that access is available for families and children that experience barriers to inclusion. 
• We need funds to continue growing the farming infrastructure such as a harvesting processing station, farm to table community pavilion, and land maintenance workshop so that we can continue to offer the land-based regenerative farming education to the children and the community, and grow the organic/biodynamic bounty of crops that we use to feed the children and offer to charitable organizations that feed hungry people in our community.

Village Playgarden and Wildseed Farm is committed to helping to raise a new generation of healthy, confident, capable children. We are committed to supporting families in their children’s foundational years. We are committed to being a model for land-based, nature loving, sustainable, antiracist, nonviolent, multigenerational communities. 

The Vision of the Future is Now

Your contribution will insure that we can continue to serve children and their families in a way that helps mitigate the spread of Covid.  Your contribution will support regenerative farming in an urban context. Your contribution will support a model for diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racisism, holistic and sustainable community building, and encouraging the capacity of today’s children and youth, and their parents as they work to reimagine our world.  Your contribution will support the success of future generations. The vision of the future is now.

We are so grateful to each of you for being a part of our growing Village. Thank you for your support of our vision. This is a community effort and we can only do it with you.

Other Ways You Can Help

We are grateful for all of the ways in which people contribute to the success of our work. Some can give generous financial contributions. Some can give modest financial contributions. And in addition to financial contributions , some can give time and physical work. In addition to your financial contribution, please spread the word about our work. And if you are local,  come join us on at our monthly community farm days. Check our website and social media for our roster of community events and opportunities for you to support our work. Your support, and all the ways that you can offer it holds up a vision of success for future generations as they work to reimagine our world.

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Thank you!