Growing Veterans

Growing Veterans offers a new health care model that combines informal peer support with care farming. In our fields we create a safe space where veterans work together, support each other, and engage with their communities to have a successful transition home. This community interaction also lessens the divide between veterans and civilians.  Our model is helping us achieve our mission “To empower military veterans to grow food, communities, and each other.”

Our vision is to end the shocking daily veteran suicide rate by targeting its root cause: isolation, most often produced by PTSD.  Our care farming approach encourages vets to interact more fully with peers, their families, communities, and employers. In our fields vets learn about resources available to them from peers, not the medical establishment so many see as stigmatizing.

Our informal healthcare model focuses on post 9-11 veterans, their families, and local community supporters as well as older veterans. We welcome everyone onto our fields.  Needed in this age of social media, we encourage face-to-face contact with veterans and community peer supporters to foster relationships. Care farming studies show that touching and working on organic soil changes hormonal levels and is personally liberating, healthy, and restorative. Combine peer support with care farming and the result is life promoting. Or as one of our veterans summed it up: "It feels good to be putting something into the ground that is going to explode into life instead of destruction."