A women-centered land initiative in Central Florida
Abundance is something we grow.
Lilavena is building a network of small regenerative sites across Florida, where women cultivate food, flowers and honey, earn a living from the work, and share the harvest with local families and schools.
Fig. 1. What grows above the ground depends on the work below it.
Land can do more than wait to be sold.
Land is often valued mainly for what it might sell for later. Lilavena treats it as something that can produce now: food for nearby tables, flowers for classrooms, habitat for pollinators, and paid work for the women who tend it.
We are starting with one site in Central Florida. It will be small enough to run well and documented closely enough to repeat. Each site that follows will build on what the first one teaches.
How the model works
Each stage feeds the next. The cycle is the point.
Land is secured and restored
We test soil and water, rebuild what is depleted, and plant for the long term.
The land produces
Vegetables, fruit, herbs, cut flowers and, where it suits the site, honey.
Women are paid to do the work
Cultivation, harvest, distribution and teaching become paid work and lasting skills.
The harvest is shared
Produce and flowers reach local families, public schools and community partners.
The model travels
What we learn, and what we earn, helps establish the next site.
Women of Lilavena at work on the land
Builders, growers, stewards, teachers.
Women have long done much of the world’s cultivation, and much of it has gone unpaid. Lilavena is designed so that the people who make a site productive earn a living from it.
As sites are funded, we intend to create paid roles in growing, harvesting, distribution, education and site management, with room to build skills that carry into other work and other enterprises.
We will only advertise paid roles once the money to fund them is in hand.
What a site gives back
These are the outcomes we are building toward. We will report what each site actually produces once it is operating.
- Food
- Vegetables, fruit and herbs grown for nearby families and community food programs, with perennial plantings that keep producing for years.
- Flowers
- Cut flowers for classrooms, care settings and local sale, and flowering plants that feed pollinators across the seasons.
- Honey
- Kept only where it suits the site, its neighbors and its native pollinators, and always alongside habitat for wild bees.
- Schools
- Produce, flowers and growing lessons for public schools near each site, shaped with the teachers who would use them.
- Healthier ground
- Soil rebuilt with compost and cover crops, water used carefully, and land that is in better condition each year it is tended.
A network of small sanctuaries
Rather than wait for one large property, Lilavena plans a network of sites of about three to four acres each, spread across Florida. Smaller sites are easier to fund, easier to fit into a neighborhood, and less exposed if one of them struggles.
The first site is in planning. No land has been acquired yet.
Help cultivate the first site
The first campaign pays for what has to happen before anything can grow: finding and evaluating land, testing soil and water, preparing the ground, first plantings and essential infrastructure, along with the legitimate costs of forming and running the organization.
The First Site
To secure and prepare Lilavena’s first site in Central Florida: land due diligence and access, soil and water testing, site preparation, first plantings, essential infrastructure, and the costs of establishing the organization that will steward it.
We will publish the amount raised here once contributions have been received and verified against our payment records. The campaign goal will be published at the same time.
There is room for many hands
- VolunteersHelp prepare ground, distribute food and run workshops as sites open.
- Future staffRegister interest in paid growing, education and operations roles.
- PartnersSchools, food programs, growers and landholders who share the work.
- ProfessionalsLegal, finance, grant writing, design, photography and technology.
- LandholdersTell us about property in Central Florida that could become a site.
From the journal
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