Puerto Rico's Food Sovereignty Fund

This past quarter La Maraña’s team has been active with continuing the efforts to promote green spaces as alternatives to extreme heat and educating around reforestation. We have partnered with grassroots organizations and the municipality of Caguas, Puerto Rico for a reforestation project to combat urban heat islands. 

Barrio Pueblo in Caguas is one of the most concentrated urbanized areas in the archipelago, making it propense to urban heat island effect. We began collecting information about people's experiences with extreme heat and how it impacts their everyday lives. We learned that heat impacts people in regards to health problems, habit changes and inconveniences in conducting every day tasks. 

We have begun to conduct workshops around urban heat effects, comparing reforestation to deforestation and how these practices impact our communities differently. We even partnered with grassroots organizations in New York during Climate Week 2025 to present our work, network and learn what other communities are doing to combat extreme heat. We learned that many communities are being affected by this unfortunate issue and are seeking viable solutions with urgency. 

Our Food Sovereignty Fund has continuously promoted practices that alleviate problems related to poor nutritional value of imported goods, reducing gas emissions related to these imports and the mitigation of climate disaster risks in the food production systems. We are also interested in mitigating these risks in ways that promote green solutions in urban settings. 

As part of our efforts in Caguas we are planning to plant 300 trees in areas that are affected by extreme heat, continuing efforts of popular education around green solutions and contributing with designs of plant nurseries and composting. 

As always we value you being part of our work in making all of this possible. Your donation counts towards codesigning environmental solutions to everyday problems. 

Have you considered establishing a recurring donation? Recurring gifts can help us in maintaining a steady workflow to continue to conduct workshops, create green infrastructure designs for composts, plant nurseries, butterfly houses, work brigades and more!

Just go to DONATE NOW and switch from once to monthly. We really appreciate what you do to sustain our work!

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With our Semilla Fund we have continued to sustain efforts in networking with the community garden inside the University of Puerto Rico campus. As we previously reported Huerto Semilla is an active project that engages the university community in learning and developing sustainable food production gardening practices. We find meaning in this work because it aligns with La Maraña’s vision for the right to remain in the archipelago by promoting regenerative agricultural practices that promote food sovereignty.

We had previously met with the amazing folks who upkeep Huerto Semilla and held participatory design workshops where they voiced concerns about their garden and resulted in determining what challenges they wanted to resolve. The collective decision was to work with La Maraña to improve their composting system. Their ideas included the need to create a compost space that could serve multiple purposes. The compost area needed to have storage space, a water cistern and it would also need to align with the physical space and vegetation around it.

Ourt team quickly got to work and came up with a proposed design. The next meeting with Huerto Semilla was a hit! Their team loved the design and made suggestions regarding the next steps in the process. Together we were able to come up with the coordination strategies for construction. We will begin construction stages soon. Stay tuned! 

Work like this is what we strive to do, yet it isn’t possible without your financial help. Have you considered establishing a recurring donation? Recurring gifts can help us in maintaining a steady workflow to continue to conduct workshops, create green infrastructure designs for composts, plant nurseries, butterfly houses, work brigades and more!

Just go to DONATE NOW and switch from once to montlhy. We really appreciate what you do to sustain our work!