Below is an interview with Madeleine Charney and Jennifer Atlee about their history as gardeners, plant enthusiasts, and changemakers for climate iniaitives and health justice.

An interview with Madeleine Charney:

Would you briefly describe who Mothers Out Front is as an organization?

“Mothers Out Front is a climate activist group that does an array of actions, from speaking and writing to legislators, to rallying, to gathering and learning about climate change issues. We like to also support youth. We’ve shown up for a lot of sunrise activities. I could go on and on. We have done so much teaching on topics like electric buses and induction stoves, anything that helps to cool the planet, bring people together and protect all children in a nutshell.”

“The connection to People’s Medicine Project is because in Massachusetts, we have the Healthy Soil, Livable Future Action Group, and so our greater Amherst chapter decided to work with the People’s Medicine Project, initially with a no till community garden plot, at the Fort River Farm Conservation Area. There we grow some of the plants for them. It’s like a small model garden that we can show the community and promote PMP.”

How long have you been a gardener and plant enthusiast?   

“Well, I grew up with a garden in our Long Island backyard, so as a kid I was aware of gardening. And then had my very first garden in 1989 when I moved to Amherst and I rented an apartment with a plot. And I was so excited just to get my hands dirty. And then I went to the Northampton Community Garden and I had four plots adjacent. Long story short, I wound up working on a kibbutz and helped on an organic farm in the Arava Desert in Israel for three months. Then I went to the Conway School of Landscape Design. I also did permaculture design certification in 1998 in Coldstream Scotland with Graham Bell. And after the Conway School, I did the Master Gardener course. And now I have an acre in Amherst that my husband and I steward together. “

Who are your closest plant allies?

“Well, I do love Mugwort. It’s so funny because when I first learned how, you know, wonderful a plant Mugwort is, I put some in a pot and was tending it. And now I just see it everywhere. It feels very mineralizing. I also love Motherwort. It’s very comforting, even though it’s bitter. I love bitter things and I love the imagery of the fierce protective mother with all the little thorns protecting the little pink babies. So those are two that I really resonate with.”

What would you say is your relationship to plant medicine?  

“Well I’m a backyard herbalist, so self-taught and I just love playing around and trying new things. I have a closet in my Home Office that’s like my apothecary, with plants hanging and drying. I do nourishing herbal infusions with Comfrey and Mullin and Yarrow. I made my own incense recently. I had all this Tulsi that was a little too dried and old. I grounded it in my herb grinder and then put in marshmallow root, which made it stick together. Then I shaped it in cones and dried it and it really worked. Wow. Yeah. That was my favorite thing recently!”

What advice do you have for a new gardener and herbalist?  

“Go slow and observe a lot. It’s so fun to try to grow so many things. It looks so small when you plant new little things and then they start to fill in. It can feel crowded and hard to enjoy everything. And then there’s a tip that I learned from Susun Weed about foraging and harvesting- Don’t overstress yourself harvesting a lot at once. Just do it for 15 minutes and enjoy it. As soon as it starts to feel like ohh, my back’s hurting, stop, just do a little because you don’t need that much usually at once anyway. This is a pacing that I’m trying to learn myself, so I’ll pass that on to newer people as well.” 

An interview with Jennifer Atlee:

 How long have you been a gardener and plant enthusiast?   

“I moved around a lot when I was a kid but I think I always liked being with the plants. Growing up we had a a three-square foot garden in between the concrete walks in Oakland. So I’ve been gardening for a long time. I need to be with the plant beings to be happy.”

Who are some of your closest plant allies? 

“I love so many plants. I love marshmallow, but I haven’t learned as an herbalist quite how to work with them. Motherwort for my own physical psyche needs.”

“I’d love to talk about my friend Margaret because she’s part of the reason I ended up being a a major contributor to the herbs at People’s Medicine Project. She came here for three weeks to support me through surgery recovery. She is an Indigenous herbalist. She has Western herbalism and Indigenous herbal knowledge. I was recovering from surgery, so I had to slow down. Having her here was totally amazing because I had to move at the pace of being really present with the plants. That slow pace of mindful and attentive harvesting and getting to know the plants differently. The joy of working with her, having been a gardener for so many years was really precious for me.” 

What advice do you have for a new gardener and herbalist? 

“I would second what Madeline was saying about going slow and harvesting mindfully and less. I think it’s really good advice. You should never take the first and never take the last. When planting, do attend to spacing, especially for shrubs and trees. But then the other thing that I would say is just do it. Don’t plan forever. Going ahead and experimenting with the way you learn. Messing up. Saying I’m sorry, trying again.”

“And sort of both the importance of learning to grow your own plants and variety- working with enough variety, recognizing that depending on what a year is like, some plants will grow and some plants will struggle and you know, our zones are shifting. The more deep roots and variety we can make, the better off we’ll be. I could imagine for somebody brand new, maybe a little overwhelming.”

“The plants in Mama Earth are doing their damnedest to thrive. I think there’s a message thread that sometimes shows up in the world about humans being a detriment to the Earth. We have it in us to be a real positive Co-creative contribution to this world. Humans aren’t crazy-we have a crazy culture. There are other ways to live, understanding that there are plenty of ways to be human. Let’s learn. Relearn, learn new ones, cultivate new ones.”

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Hello Friends!

The big news this month is that outdoor mobile clinics are up and running for the fall. We are out offering body work and herbs in Greenfield and have two robust herbal clinics in Great (Turner’s) Falls and Springfield. COVID-protocols are in effect: please wear a mask if you come.

We spent our short hiatus over the summer growing plants, hosting volunteer workdays, and revamping our volunteer systems. Thanks to our new volunteer coordinator, Tory Field, we created new ways for volunteers to support the work that we do, including a Grow-a-Row program (the Herbalista Free Clinic coined this term) in which local herbalists and gardeners signed up to grow plants for the People’s Medicine Project apothecary.

The benefits of the Grow a Row Program are many, taking pressure off of our small staff to grow/process everything and distributing the task of growing across a network of small farms and gardens. 

Being supported by community in this way gives us more ease in what we do and insulates the apothecary against risk (such as a flood event that wipes out an entire garden), but even more than that, it lifts our spirits to think about how the plants increasingly form a web of healing throughout our community. 

Those plants, along with the ones that Ced Clearwater and volunteers grow and harvest in the People’s Medicine Garden, make their way to the apothecary. There, apothecary manager Lynn Golan and volunteers transform them into dried tea blends, syrups, tinctures, glycerites, and more. 

From the apothecary, the herbs make their way through clinics, mutual aid distributions, and herbalism consults to people and families who don’t have access to them through other avenues.

But they all start from a seed and a pair of loving hands. We’re delighted to spotlight some of those hands below.

Stay well,
Abby, Leslie, and the PMP Team

More in this Newsletter:

• Meet the Growers
• Fall Free Clincs

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With frosty mornings and early evenings upon us now,  that’s a wrap on our fall season of outdoor mobile clinics! Thanks to everyone who came out to access services, volunteered at clinics, grew plants, donated medicines, and supported from afar. Together, we take care of each other!

But just because we’re not out on the sidewalk slinging herbs and giving massages, doesn’t mean that we’re hibernating for the winter.

We have a whole slew of remote offerings available: from online zoom movement classes to one-on-one herbalism consults over the phone (and so much more), we’re proud to continue offering COVID-safe support during the colder months. Scroll down for a lot more information, including a peak into what a Feldenkrais class looks like. 

In the meantime, keep an eye out for herbs that we’ll be giving out at mutual aid distributions and a fundraising campaign to build a greenhouse so that we can keep making plant medicine more and more accessible. 

Drink tea, be kind, and take care,
Abby, Leslie, and the team at PMP

Scroll on Down

In this newsletter:

– Welcoming new funders the Robert C and Tina Sohn Foundation
– Free online Healing Through Movement Class Series
– Clinic Remote Offerings 
– What is Feldenkrais? An Interview with Josh
– What We’re Reading: Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings– Recipe for throat-soothing Sage-Infused Honey

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Whew, hello friends! 

When we last updated you in early-August, the programming for this fall was merely a twinkle in our eye. But very quickly after that, we pooled most of our resources into adapting our existing clinic model into a series of outdoor, covid-19 safe mobile clinics, and we hit the ground running in early September (more on that below). Meanwhile, we have also been doing the work of tending to relationship: meeting with partners and participating in workshops (more on this below too).

Before we share any more, though, I want to take a moment to publicly thank the supporters (you know who you are) who came together in a rapid fundraising campaign to meet a match from a private foundation and help us raise enough money (in just a few weeks!) to make these clinics happen: the power of community, it’s really something!

You know, I was explaining what we do to a friend a couple of weeks ago, and they said something to the effect of, “It’s amazing that something like that exists— how is it funded?” 

We actually get this response a lot, because very few organizations in this country do what we do. In fact, we can count on one hand the number of on-going free clinics that we are aware of that offer integrative CAM (complementary and alternative modalities)— let along through a consent-based and social justice lens.

So, when you participate— by going to a workshop, donating supplies or dollars, or coming to clinic…. (continued…)

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A week ago, we wrote a draft of a newsletter introducing a series of newsletters about health disparity in the context of Covid-19. But in the last week, the context has evolved dramatically, and our country is literally and figuratively on fire over white supremacy, police brutality, and the value of black lives. Talking about health disparity is as relevant as ever, but we want to take some time to put it in context.

The news reports keep saying protests are over the murder George Floyd. This is like reporting, “Raindrop breaks the Dam.” Before George Floyd was killed by police, even just this month, there was Breonna Taylor was shot by police in her home. It’s been six years since Eric Garner couldn’t breathe. It’s been nearly 30 years since Rodney King was brutally beaten. There are so many names we don’t even know. People of color, and especially black folks, live under the constant threat of state-sanctioned violence. But they’re also dying in record numbers from the pandemic.

In the past month, The Guardian reported that black Americans are dying at three times the rate of white Americans, Navajo Nation has the highest infection rate in the country (though, worth mentioning, also one of the highest testing rates), and not long after these facts entered the public debate, it was actually white middle class Americans protesting to reopen— not working class people.

We know these things are related. This is a nation that, as a whole, devalues black and indigenous life. (And queer lives, poor lives, immigrant lives.) There is, and so rightfully, a wave of fury and discussion over police brutality right now—and we don’t want to detract from it.

But we do want to take a moment to show how the current health crisis is integrally related to the state-sanctioned violence, how health disparities are another arm of oppression. The conversation about “health” is often shallowly located in the arena of diet, exercise, and personal choice— we think these are a drop in the bucket compared to environmental racism, systems of oppression, and police violence. If you think that’s a stretch, this is a good moment to learn more. We recommend starting with “How Racism is Bad for Our Bodies.”

Current events open windows into our health system and its history— and it’s neither simple nor pretty. It takes time to explore why, for instance, even when controlling for factors like wealth and level of education, people of color have higher incidence at at-risk conditions than their white neighbors.

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