Thinking about Training for Regenerative Culture-Building
It's been an exciting week at Rē - in partnership with Growing Roots, a local community-based organization in rural Tennessee, we are bringing in some new AmeriCorps volunteers! We recently supported their first and second round of training, which included place-based history, local food systems, and community garden safety.
If we step into the big picture, we find that these three seemingly distinct educational areas are amongst the key elements of regenerative culture—elements that too often been eroded over the past century in how we think about education and are need of, well, some regenerating! Towards that end, we are, here, leaning into some of the big-picture questions around what are we educating for when volunteers come in to be supportive.
The Great Disconnection: How We Lost Our Local Knowledge
What we might think of as the Great Disconnection—the systematic separation of people from the knowledge systems that had sustained communities for generations—has a long and complex history that, within Western Civilization, we can trace back to (at least) the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the Great European Witch Hunts in the 1400s and 1500s, which established frameworks for dominating both land and local/indigenous knowledge systems.
For now, we'll focus on the last century, when this disconnection accelerated dramatically through changes in educational systems.
In the 1920s, '30s and '40s, the role of farming in the U.S. shifted... for a lot of reasons, including the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, massive internal migrations, and the rise of monoculture and commercial agriculture. Educators increasingly focused on agriculture as an occupational specialty, rather than an integral part of every student's life. This shift marked a critical acceleration of the Great Disconnection, moving knowledge transmission from community-based systems into institutional frameworks that prioritized technical specialization over place-based wisdom.
Before this period, farming techniques and knowledge were passed down through oral traditions, embedded in daily life and community relationships. In agriculturally orientated societies, it is common for young people to learn not just how to grow food, but why certain practices worked in their specific place, which varieties thrived in local soils, and how seasonal patterns connected to broader ecological rhythms. This would not only be agricultural education—it was cultural transmission of what we now call regenerative practice.
The consequences of this educational shift extend far beyond farming. The program objectives and research agendas laid the groundwork for the corporatization and technologization of agriculture in the United States through the use of the public university system. As formal institutions took over knowledge transmission, communities lost their role as knowledge keepers, and with it, the understanding that sustainability emerges from intimate relationships between people, place, and practice. This perpetuated a disconnect from place that had already been well established through colonial practices of forcing native people off their land and enforced labor of people from Africa.
Why Place-Based History Matters for Regeneration
Understanding local history is not nostalgic romanticism—it's practical intelligence for regenerative futures. Every place holds patterns - stories - of both resilience and extraction, stories of how people have either worked with or against ecological limits. When young people learn these patterns, they develop what might be called "place literacy"—the ability to read landscape as text, to understand how past decisions shape present possibilities.
Place-based education promotes learning that is rooted in what is local—the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place, connecting students to the continuum of human-land relationships in their specific context. This knowledge becomes especially crucial in rural areas, where the solutions to many of our ecological problems lie in an approach that celebrates, empowers, and nurtures the cultural, artistic, historical and spiritual resources of each local community and region, and champions their ability to bring those resources to bear on the healing of nature and community.
Place-based history also reveals what has been lost and what might be recovered. Traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous land management practices, and time-tested farming techniques often survive in local stories, family memories, and landscape remnants. Training programs that help young people uncover these histories don't just preserve the past—they recover tools for the future.
Local Food Systems as Regenerative Infrastructure
The complexity of modern food systems has created a dangerous ignorance about how food actually gets made. Most people, including some who are young rural residents, have little understanding of soil health, seed saving, preservation techniques, or seasonal eating patterns, much less the complex cross-cultural dynamics that most places (in the U.S. and elsewhere) entail. This knowledge gap represents more than lost skills—it's a severed relationship with the biological foundation of human life.
Local food systems training reconnects people with these fundamental relationships while building practical resilience. As you can probably tell, it goes deeper than individual skill-building. When communities can feed themselves, they become less dependent on extractive global supply chains and more invested in the long-term health of their local ecosystems. Food sovereignty becomes ecological sovereignty.
Young people need to understand not just how to grow food, but how to process, preserve, distribute, and market it within local economic systems. This knowledge creates the foundation for bioregional economies that work with rather than against ecological limits.
Community Garden Safety as Social Technology
Training in community garden safety might seem like a narrow technical focus, but it represents something much more significant: the social technology of collective care. Community gardens are spaces where multiple forms of knowledge intersect—horticultural, ecological, social, and cultural. Learning to create safe, inclusive, and productive shared spaces builds the social skills that regenerative cultures require.
We don't always think about garden safety - we often just go out and get our hands dirty. Which is great, but when working with groups, it is important to check in about garden safety. components of community garden safety vary, but they might include:
Physical safety: Tool use, ergonomics, lifting techniques, identifying poisonous plants, sun protection
Food safety: Soil testing for contaminants, safe composting practices, proper washing/handling of produce
Social safety: Creating inclusive spaces, conflict resolution, establishing clear agreements about shared resources
Environmental safety: Pesticide-free practices, protecting beneficial insects, water conservation
Legal/liability issues: Insurance, waivers, understanding local regulations
Accessibility: Making gardens usable for people with different physical abilities and backgrounds
Why this matters for regeneration:
The social safety aspects are probably most crucial for regenerative culture - learning how to create spaces where diverse people can work together, share resources equitably, and navigate conflicts constructively. These are exactly the social technologies needed for community resilience.
The environmental safety components connect to broader ecological literacy - understanding soil health, beneficial insects, water cycles, etc.
Physical and food safety matter because community food production needs to be sustainable and trustworthy for people to actually rely on local food systems.
Training in community garden safety might seem like a narrow technical focus, but it represents something much more significant: the social technology of collective care. Community gardens are spaces where multiple forms of knowledge intersect—horticultural, ecological, social, and cultural. Learning to create safe, inclusive, and productive shared spaces builds the social skills that regenerative cultures require.
When we expand what this means (which this first program was not trying to do), then we see skills that can include conflict resolution, resource sharing, collaborative decision-making, and inclusive leadership—exactly the capacities needed to navigate the complex challenges of ecological and social healing. When young people learn to facilitate community gardens, they're learning to facilitate community resilience more broadly.
At its best, regeneration isn't just about technical practices—it's about creating conditions where all community members can participate in food production and environmental stewardship. This inclusive approach becomes essential as climate change and economic instability require broader community involvement in local resilience strategies.
Building Regenerative Capacity in Rural Futures
Rural communities face unique challenges—population loss, economic disinvestment, and ecological degradation—that require locally-rooted solutions. Young people who understand their place's history, can participate in local food systems, and can facilitate community collaboration, become crucial contributors to regenerative rural economies.
Growing Roots' work with AmeriCorps volunteers is an exciting opportunity. Some volunteers come from rural backgrounds and need opportunities to develop deeper place-based knowledge and leadership skills. Others come from urban or suburban contexts and need an introduction to rural ways of life and land-based practices. We all benefit from integrated training that connects historical understanding, practical skills, and social facilitation.
Other key elements of regenerative cultures, they work alongside many other important components, can include:
Economic systems that value care, reciprocity, and mutual aid over extraction and competition
Governance structures based on collective decision-making and inclusive participation
Spiritual and cultural practices that honor interconnection with the more-than-human world
Healing traditions and restorative justice practices for addressing harm and conflict
Energy systems and built environments designed to work with natural cycles and limits
Arts, storytelling, and celebration practices that strengthen community bonds and cultural identity
A Call to Educational Action
The path forward requires educational institutions to embrace what David Orr calls "place-conscious education"—learning that helps young people become "rooted" rather than "mobile, rootless and autistic toward their places." This can mean designing curricula that integrate local history, ecological literacy, and community engagement as core rather than supplementary elements.
Critically, it is participatory.
Practically, this can look like partnerships between schools, historical societies, community gardens, local farms, and cultural organizations. It can mean training teachers to facilitate place-based inquiry and community-engaged learning. It can mean assessment practices that value local knowledge alongside standardized skills.
Most importantly, it can mean recognizing that the skills needed for regenerative futures already exist in communities—they just need to be cultivated, connected, and transmitted to new generations. The Growing Roots training points toward what becomes possible when we treat education as a form of cultural regeneration, building the knowledge systems that communities need to heal both land and social relationships.
Organizations like Growing Roots, in collaboration with groups like Rē, don't just share skills and knowledge to young people, they strongly uplift that the learning is reciprocal. Together, they hold space for communities to remember what they already know about what it is to live well in a place. In a time of ecological crisis and social fragmentation, this remembering becomes a form of resistance, resilience, and hope.
We would love to hear more about how you are thinking about educating for, in, and alongside rural communities.
Growing Roots and Rē have a busy, in person summer set of gatherings planned, including this coming Sunday when we will be doing native wildflower seeding! Please reach out to us if you want more information about our local-Tennessee programming this summer.