Update:
Hello all!
Sorry it has been a moment since you have heard from us. It has been a bit of a chaotic summer. It seems there are three things driving dysfunction at the prison these days; covid, heatwaves and a lack of staffing. I am a firm believer that the covid pandemic fundamentally changed a very broken system. It very well may be that we are in the death throes of the punitive model. That will hopefully someday be a good thing but as we all know, old habits die hard. In the meantime we are serving some of the toughest years we have experienced. As I write this we are in yet another covid lockdown quarantine. Prisoners who test positive go to IMU for a ten day isolation period. The rest of us sit in our cells with no programming and wait to see if we have tested positive. Tomas and I wrote a piece about this in Filter this summer and it is weird to see it play out again. (A Pandemic of Anxiety at https://filtermag.org/pandemic-anxiety-prison/)
Luckily we have our little community and we are finding ways to support each other. In positive news, we have spent a lot of time in conversations with Art and have taken significant steps to create Singing Heart Forest Therapy Retreat Center. Our goal is to eventually have a series of cabins and yurts at the ranch that can be used for forest therapy retreats for system impacted people. We will have much more on this as it develops.
The coolest news is that our website is now up and running!! Huge props to Kev for making that a reality.
KEY POINTS
Point of Perserverance:
In reading through the previous newsletters it is appalling at how many start off with us being in a Covid lockdown. We are rapidly approaching 3 years of this and it is taxing to say the least. The best we can say about it is we are building our endurance and figuring out ways to make our systems "pandemic proof" as much as possible.
Point of Practice:
We have really been working to dial in the Black Solider Fly management systems. It can appear to be labor intensive at times and in order to make it truly sustainable we need to figure out more of a perpetual motion process. We have had a massive surplus of grubs this summer and the chickens are absolutely crazy for them. At one point we were feeding them so much that they started refusing their regular feed. Spoiled little monsters.:-) :-)
Point of Peace:
September was Juan's birthday and we had a series of feasts. I made a cake that a bunch of us chipped in on and it was mammoth! It weighed over 35 pounds. It was so fun to cut off big slices and pass them out. It reminded us of the sense of community we hope to have at EARN and how someday we will be able to get together with all of you.
THE PLANET
We spent the majority of the summer working on projects and pushing a proposal through the incredibly difficult layers of DOC bureaucracy, that would create a training center here at WCC for prisoners to learn food waste mangement techniques. Namely, black soldier flies, vermicomposting and Bokashi. The WA legislature passed a landmark bill last year essentially mandating that all businesses and public entities that produce food waste find alternative ways of dealing with it using one of the following methods: conventional composting, anaerobic compositing, vermicomposting or black soldier flies!!!!
We were blown away when we saw the very technologies we have been working on for over a decade in the law! What this means is that there is going to be funding and energy around the very areas we have made ourselves experts at. We prepared a proposal on it and are hoping to foster a relationship between SPP and Correctional Industries to create something very special. It is always hard getting something new started and especially in this climate but we are hopeful.
BIG IDEA
The folks at the Sustainability in Prisons Project (SPP) have been incredibly important to us through this journey and we believe they will be essential partners down the road. What you may not know is all the different projects that they are involved in. We spend a lot of time talking compositing programs but that is just one area they support. They have dog programs, beekeeping, and multiple conservation programs that have prisoners working with the Dept. of Wildlife to raise endangered species and the Dept. Agriculture to raise key prairie plants and grasses just to name a few. They teach a wide variety of classes and develop curriculum that can be used in carceral settings. It would take several newsletters to outline everything SPP does (you can check it all out at www.sustainabilityinprisonsproject.org) but suffice it so say they have made an idellible impact on the prison system and have been a champion for starting these types of programs around the nation.
Our goal is to work with them once EARN is fully up and running, to create numerous career paths for prisoners who have found their "calling" in environmental work.
FINAL THOUGHTS...
These past few years have been difficult and prison has really deteriorated to a place where people are struggling with mental health and fatigue issues. But this only reinforces our commitment to build EARN as the need for restorative services and support is greater than ever. Thank you so much for being our community out there and supporting us!