From Garden to Plate at Ionia Inc.

“As it gets colder, all of the kids have been picking and jamming buckets and buckets of cranberries, bearberries, rosehips and crabapples. It’s been an incredibly lush year for the garden and for the wild berries — maybe it’s global warming? Whatever the cause, the kids and teens are very pleased.”

— Eliza Eller from Kasilof, Alaska, writing on behalf of From Garden to Plate at Ionia Inc.

Young people picking berries in the Seasonal Simple Activities Program. Photo courtesy of Ionia Inc.

Ionia is an exciting, redemptive and therapeutic place in the spruce forest of the Kenai Peninsula, more than 100 miles south of Anchorage. It is a small-scale multigenerational village environment for mentally disabled people who come to Ionia on their own initiative. At Ionia they practice new patterns of self-sufficient and healthy living in which mental, physical and planetary health are integrated.

From Garden to Plate is a therapeutic program at Ionia that engages the community in organic farm development, community gardening and family cooking. Funded in part by the Presbyterian Hunger Program from One Great Hour of Sharing Offerings, From Garden to Plate not only promotes viable and healthy life, it also promotes mental health, well-being, agriculture, family, community and environmental awareness. It is a model for Americans who forget how important the land and community is to their own sustenance and physical well-being — and, yes, mental health as well.

Teenagers learn about the Food and Health Program at the Ionia youth conference. Photo courtesy of Ionia Inc.

In July Ionia hosts a two-week Youth Conference. Thirty youth are integrated into the ongoing Ionia experience. The two weeks are filled with experiences connecting mental, physical and planetary health. The youth conferees participate in the daily pattern of life at Ionia, working side by side those who live at Ionia in the garden, the kitchen and the all-important wood pile. Also part of the daily pattern are directed discussions on the wisdom of the connections Ionia seeks to model. In the photograph above three conferees prepare wholesome sustenance for their day on the trail hiking in the nearby beautiful Chugach Mountains — yet another all-important connecting experience.

Tour the Ionia community and see children and grownups side by side in garden and kitchen and harvest field. Eliza Eller writes to Presbyterians: “Thank you for your continuing support this year ... For the first time, growing 90 percent of [Ionia’s] food needs feels like a very real possibility in the foreseeable future — which is very relaxing and exciting for many of us. It’s been a longtime dream, held deep in our hearts.”