About

Spring Creek Homesteading Fund is a nonprofit registered in the State of Pennsylvania. Our Mission is to support local self-sufficiency within the Spring Creek Watershed of Central Pennsylvania by supporting new, renovated and expanded food gardens and orchards, urban farms, community greenhouses, kitchens, bakeries, farmers markets, and workshop programs in the homesteading arts.

CONTACT: If you’d like to share information with blog readers – event announcements, posts, photos, links, ideas – please email Program Director Katherine Watt.

Vision: Sketches (slideshow)

Poster: SCHF Poster – PDF; SCHF Poster – PowerPoint

Program Areas:

• Reskilling – Organizing reskilling workshops in the homesteading arts.
• Building – Coordinating funding, materials and labor to establish, renovate and expand gardens, orchards, urban farms, community greenhouses, kitchens, bakeries, farmers markets and other relocalized food infrastructure.
• Fundraising & Grantmaking – Financially supporting public and private food security projects.

Board of Directors:

• President – Joshua Lambert
• Secretary – Dana Stuchul
• Treasurer – Katherine Watt

How We Got Started:

The international Transition Towns movement has an explanatory model for current global uncertainty – peak oil, climate change and economic contraction. They’ve also developed a response model centered on relocalization to reduce oil-dependent supply chains and help communities reskill local populations in traditional essentials like growing and preserving food, building and repairing structures and simple machines, and strengthening social networks. These relocalization strategies aren’t new, but since 2005, TT has been practicing and developing an effective organizing model, bringing the ideas to many communities around the world as the crises intensify.

Farmers, gardeners and environmentalists in the Centre region have been working toward a more sustainable community for decades. In July 2010, the Centre Daily Times launched a monthly Sustainable Centre County page, publishing columns by dozens of sustainability activists collectively possessing hundreds of years of experience in the field. Links to those columns are posted at the bottom of the “Directory” page. In August 2010, I launched a blog called Transition Centre County – an electronic community bulletin board – to generally support the work of sustainability folks in and around Centre County through networking, calendar services, information sharing, and archiving of events. (The content of that blog has since been moved here to Spring Creek Homesteading).

In late August 2011, Spring Creek Homesteading Fund was incorporated as a nonprofit dedicated to building community self-sufficiency through grants for gardens, urban farms, greenhouses, community kitchens, and through reskilling workshops in the homesteading arts. In early September 2011, this blog was launched to support the fund’s focus on food system relocalization and reskilling.

ARCHIVED EMAIL UPDATES: 

• SCHF Update 9.20.11
• SCHF Update 11.7.11
• SCHF Update 11.22.11
• SCHF Update 12.16.11
• SCHF Update 1.9.12
• SCHF Update 2.15.12
• SCHF Update 3.12.12
• SCHF Update 3.22.12
• SCHF Update 3.31.12
• SCHF Update 4.17.12
• SCHF Update 5.1.12
• SCHF Update 5.18.12
• SCHF Update 6.1.12
• SCHF Update 6.18.12
• SCHF Update 7.24.12
• SCHF Update 8.24.12
• SCHF Update 9.11.12
• SCHF Update 10.4.12
• SCHF Update 10.16.12
• SCHF Update 11.6.12
• SCHF Update 11.20.12
• SCHF Update 12.6.12
• SCHF Update 12.20.12
• SCHF Update 1.8.13
• SCHF Update 1.25.13
• SCHF Update 2.10.13
• SCHF Update 2.26.13
• SCHF Update 3.15.13
• SCHF Update 3.29.13
• SCHF Update 4.24.13

WAYS TO SUPPORT OUR WORK:

Time:

• Volunteer to teach a workshop, work on a gardening project or write and take photographs for the blog.

Land:

• Provide your privately-owned, sunny land parcels and a water source for an aspiring landless gardener or urban farmer to plant crops for sharing or personal consumption.

Donations:

• Send checks made out to: ”Spring Creek Homesteading Fund” to 156 West Hamilton Ave., State College PA, 16801. We will mail you a thank-you note and receipt if you provide your mailing address.
• We are a nonprofit corporation registered with the State of Pennsylvania, but we don’t yet have 501(c)3 status with the IRS, so your donations aren’t tax-deductable. We filed for IRS tax-exemption in November 2012 and are awaiting the response.

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Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

• Wanderer, your footsteps are
  the road, and nothing more;
  wanderer, there is no road,
  the road is made by walking.
  By walking one makes the road,
  and upon glancing back
  one sees the path
  that never will be trod again.
  Wanderer, there is no road–
  Only wakes upon the sea.
  • “Proverbios y cantares XXIX” [Proverbs and Songs 29], Campos de Castilla (1912); trans. Betty Jean Craige in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Louisiana State University Press, 1979)