The Mission of the Living Environment Foundation (LEF)
is to cultivate diversity in soil, seed, and community
through ecological stewardship and biodynamic agriculture.
LEF VISION: Traditionally, farms throughout the world have been places where human beings can learn about and participate in life processes. When someone sows a seed, then harvests seed from the same plant, they see the unfolding and development of a life from beginning to end. Through the Living Environment Foundation (LEF) we wish to invite the wider community to connect with and learn from the vital mosaic of the farm’s living environment. LEF promotes opportunities in cultural, social, therapeutic and economic life within the living fabric of farms that provide them their nourishment. Lastly, we intend to help farms go into the future by searching for ways to hold the land and manage it through land trusts and trained young agriculturalists.
LEF STATEMENT OF PURPOSE:
The Living Environment Foundation (LEF) advances its mission and vision by supporting:
- Living soil and healthy local food arising out of an organic and biodynamic approach to agriculture;
- The maintenance, improvement, and safeguarding of the earth’s biodiversity, particularly through the culture and practice of selection and saving of open-pollinated seeds;
- The integration of people and landscape;
- Developing and demonstrating ways for social, cultural, economic and therapeutic activities to be pursued in balance and harmony with the living environment of the earth;
- Supporting, creating and maintaining safe and harmonious living, learning, and working environments for children and adults, the disadvantaged, those with special needs, and other vulnerable populations;
- Development, research and education related to all of the above;
- Creating and demonstrating alternative technologies that promotes balance and harmony with the living environment of the earth;
- Farms to go into the future, by exploring ways to hold the land and manage it through land trusts and trained young agriculturalists.
Founders of Living Environment Foundation Beth Corymb Everett and Nathan Corymb Clark have been involved in an international non-profit organization working and living with people with special needs, called Camphill Village (www.camphillvillage.org) for over 25 years in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and New York,
England and Switzerland. They lived in Camphill Village USA in Copake, New York from 1998 until 2010, where they founded the Turtle Tree Biodynamic Seed Initiative (www.turtletreeseed.org) as a workshop for people with special needs that focused on growing and selling organic/biodynamic seeds. They returned in 2010 to grow seed at Beth’s family farm in Scottsbluff, NE where Beth’s, grandparents homesteaded in the 1800’s. The farm has been certified organic since 2009. Beth and Nathan are life-long members of Seed-Savers Exchange, as well as the Biodynamic Gardening and Farming Association. For more information about Beth and Nathan’s work, see the farm’s website, www.meadowlarkhearth.org.
The LEF Board
Santana Tamarack, President
Tom Smith, Vice President
Anne Radford, Secretary
Megan Koppenhafer, Treasurer
Joyce Evans
Cora Lee Khambatta
Frank Young
Nathan Clark
Beth Everett