Medicine Bowl Giving Circle

Medicine Bowl is a constellation of movement organizers, farmers, and land stewards who are on a mission to nourish, feed, house & build alternative infrastructures for their communities and themselves. Nestled on 142 acres of land in the Green Mountains of Western North Carolina, Medicine Bowl is a home and a hub for healing and movement building in the South.

Our work is focused primarily on building power, resilience, and healing with, and for, communities of color -- particularly Black and Indigenous peoples of this land: the Lumbee, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee. The political climate demands that we provide sanctuary and respite for our movement organizers that have, and continue to, lead the way as capitalism crumbles and climate disaster multiplies.

Medicine Bowl’s long term vision, strategies, and key tactics, include:

• Harriet Tubman Survival School (HTSS): HTSS is an immersive program designed to train BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) organizers in land-based survival skills, healing modalities, and emergency preparedness techniques.
• Residential Program: Medicine Bowl has a thriving residential community of queer, trans, and non-binary Black, Indigenous, People of Color individuals and families (currently 3 residents). Residents share in the stewarding, maintenance, and overall caretaking of Medicine Bowl grounds, buildings, and barns, including their living quarters and common areas within.
• Giving Circle: We believe in alternative and solidarity economies, which require us to share financial, technical, and cultural resources to land based communities within our networks based in NC, SC, VA, WVA, TN, KY, MS, AL, MS, LA, and South Africa.
• Convening Space & Programming: Medicine Bowl is a place for BIPOC and rural white folks to access land, animals, food, clean water, and meeting space for ritual, work, and retreat.
• Disaster Preparedness via Resiliency Hub: Especially in the devastating wake of Hurricane Helene on Asheville and the surrounding areas, we must equip Medicine Bowl to be a hub for disaster relief so we can do the tending to our people that State and Federal institutions leave behind. By partnering with comrades from across the south we are better positioned to prepare, prevent, respond, and mitigate the harms of climate change while being interconnected to other southern resiliency hubs.

Medicine Bowl is a sustainable living practice space. We are actively and intentionally living out our organizing principles, which require us to be in right relationship with the land and one another - the Executive Director must embody and model their understanding of this primary value while navigating Medicine Bowl’s day to day.