Living Earth Center - Give to the Max Day 2024

Living Earth Center (LEC) brings people of all traditions together to cultivate common ground and seek justice through education, encounter, and community agriculture.

LEC works to grow resilient communities by cultivating healthy food and fostering relationships through the sharing of common ground. We operate a 2+ acre Community Garden, manage the 1-acre Blue Earth County Community Farm, provide Garden Consulting Services, and host annual community gatherings.

We are uniquely positioned to help address the problems of food insecurity and food sovereignty in south central Minnesota through our Community Food Connection Program (CFC). The CFC is an aggregation of 5 programs: Youth Gardening Initiative, where we connect youth to the land with hands on gardening classes; Produce Donation, where produce grown at the Community Farm is donated to local nonprofits directly engaged in getting food to those in need; Emerging Growers, where people traditionally denied access to land can have larger plots of land to grow food, much of which is culturally significant and not readily available in southern Minnesota; Garden Partners, where we provide Community Garden plots free of cost to groups looking to integrate gardening into their program offerings; and Garden Scholarship where we provide Community Garden plots to any community members who are unable to pay the annual garden fee.

During the 2024 growing season, we donated over 2,800 lbs of food to local partners, served over 1,500 youth through our Youth Gardening Initiative's new Seed to Sauce Program, and partnered with 17 emerging growers (up from 3 in 2022, our inaugural year). While we are proud of these statistics, what drives our work are the connections we build and our desire to foster a sense of place where all in our community feel welcome and at home. 

Participants of CFC programs have commented that being at one of our growing spaces has a positive effect on their physical and mental wellbeing. This sense of connection to each other and the land is at the heart of everything we do, and its positive reverberations can be felt throughout our community.