Sol Root: Seedling Fundraiser

Sol Root began in 2018 and incorporated as a General Partnership in 2021. In 2022 we applied to lease land at the Sunol Ag Park and were granted our first lease!

With this achievement of our first lease comes even greater responsibility- and we need financial support to take Sol Root from a start-up to a viable business.

We invite your support, as Sol Root is in this seedling stage, to water this beautiful seedling with a donation of any amount.

Learn more about Sol Root!

Marcella and Courtney are the co-founders of Sol Root, an employee-owned and operated farm and herbal medicine business. We created Sol Root because of the need for healing, (re)connection, and remembering.

With ancestral and folk medicine knowledge and technologies, Sol Root cultivates connections between the land and people through organic farming, herbal wellness products, and education circles. Located on 0.65 acres in Sunol, California we grow medicinal herbs, flowers, corn, beans, squash, and watermelon. Some of the medicinal herbs we grow are chamomile, tulsi, lemon balm, hibiscus, marigold, yarrow, pericón , and calendula, which we create into products like herbal oils, tea blends, balms, agua florida, and dried bulk herbs. We also offer educational experiences on farming, herbal medicine, womb wellness, and other self-care and mental health topics.

We bring reverence to farming through offerings, ceremonies, prayers, and ancestral practices. Our work is always in honor of the land, the waters, the cosmos, the original people of where we farm, the Ohlone People, and our Ancestors who are with us on this journey.

Sol Root believes that farming can be a healing art, and we approach it as such because of the ways that colonial and capitalist systems and structures have caused harm and death of both people and land.

We know that there is no care in capitalist systems.

As capitalism crumbles, different systems and ways of living are being birthed, and there is potential for coming together to create our own solutions and uplift people who have been doing the work of tending to the lands, waters, and people’s bodies and spirits. We honor the mothers, grandmothers, deathworkers, birthworkers, the farmers and farmworkers, the herbalists, energy workers, the community cooks, the caregivers, the builders and creators and creatives; those who have come before us, those with us now, and those who are to come in the future.

The plants show us that death is part of the cyclical nature of life. Death of capitalism is not the end of the world. It is time to bring in what will nourish us.

Creating folk herbal medicines, tending to the land, relating with the Cosmos, and holding circles are ancestral technologies that Sol Root offers to cultivate connections between land and people.

While Sol Root has offerings for all people, we center Black women, Indigenous women, women of color, and we create safe space for LGBTQ+ community.

Because of who we are as women with both Mexicana and European roots, who are on a path of unlearning colonialism and white supremacy, a foundational intention of Sol Root is to be a space of healing from these paradigms.

Sol Root’s vision is a world where people live from their hearts and in their joy, where intergenerational relationships and cultural traditions are nourished and thrive.

Our Ask- $569,000

If our words, images, work, reflects your values and if you see yourself reflected in the path we are walking, then we ask you to nourish Sol Root with the offering of dollars, spreading the word of our campaign, and sharing about our business.

Why $569,000?

Your donation will support us in the following ways:

Wages

Commercial space

Infrastructure

Program development

Sol Root is currently a general partnership, and our long-term vision is a worker-owned cooperative farming and herbal medicine business. Our big dream is to caregive the land, including farming, riparian restoration, and fire ecology. Space for permanent real estate, both residential and commercial. Housing for those who tend the land and for community businesses and organizations to operate out of. There will be space for education, ceremonies, growing food and medicine, building and operating an herbal apothecary, and cooking.

This is a long term vision that we’ve been building toward since 2018, and we are at a pivotal point with our first lease to showcase our dream on this small scale. With your financial support we can create a foundation and bring in more partners so that we can expand and reach our long term vision.

There is much work to do. Marcella and Courtney have jobs that take away time, energy, mental and emotional capacity, that could be directed to business, production, marketing, etc…

We invite your support so that Marcella and Courtney can focus their energy on developing the foundation necessary to build Sol Root to its full potential. That full potential includes providing livelihood, living wages for future partners/ farm worker-owners. Together we can create spaces for healing and bringing in the world we want to see, which is supportive, loving, nurturing, and reciprocal.

Part of nurturing is receiving, so we open ourselves up to receive in honor of the Great Earth Mother that we tend to and who in turn provides abundant crops. Through Sol Root’s offerings, we nourish our communities and the Earth. We invite you to support our work with a financial donation if you’re able.

Our Values

Nurturing Humanity: rehumanizing ourselves by how we relate; welcoming accountability, love, honesty, and shedding colonial, racist, capitalist, patriarchal paradigms and narratives.

Cultivating a Matriarchal Society: centering mothers, parents, caregivers, and those who most need their village in order to live in their joy and grow; developing deep trust in the intuition of our own bodies.

Cyclical Living: harmonizing with our environments, circumstances, and the Seasons.

Reverence for Elements: honoring the elements that give life; water, wind, fire, and earth.

Rest & Fun: bringing in ease, joy, and humor.

Please follow us on Instagram, where we’ll be sharing more about this campaign and our work!

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