Our Vision
Our vision is a lush and vibrant urban landscape where people are cooperating with nature to attain health and wellbeing born of genuine concern for each other and the environment.
Our Mission
The BirdHouse is a community garden in Hollywood, serving as a hub of exchange for those attracted to caring for the land and people, through arts and ecology. Our purpose is to engage each other in finding creative solutions to the most pressing issues of our times. Through permaculture, systems thinking, medicinal plants, art, singing, science and storytelling, we aspire to a new story of interdependence, to restore shared wisdom, and to have fun doing it.
Our Projects
The BirdHouse selects and develops projects that support our mission to engage each other in finding creative solutions through permaculture, systems thinking, medicinal plants, art, singing, science and storytelling. Early projects have focused on the development of physical structures, and the establishment of biological resources at the BirdHouse Community Garden.
In our built environment, we seek to maximize energy gains by harnessing the power of the sun, the land’s topography, and the relative arrangement of the system’s components. In our biological systems, we value diversity, resiliency, and nutrient cycling, composting our garden trimmings along with food waste from community members.
Part think-tank and arts lab, part urban greening experiment and sustainable land use model, the BirdHouse is born out of cooperative intentions, all circling around the question: What does it take to live a life that the planet Earth now demands?
This inquiry finds its way into the various activities and projects we host, the workshops in permaculture, food and plant medicine, singing and storytelling – All an attempt to grapple with, and find language for, how to be response-able in this time of trouble.
Really it’s about how to love a place, and take care of it, and how to take care of each other in the process. Creating the conditions for ideas to hatch and things to grow. We are partnering with the place itself to build an abundance of diversity of interdependent insects, plants and animals. There is a vision we are nursing, that our canyon, our watershed, can become a lush and vibrant place that feeds a whole and complete system – A living thing, embedded in the urban environment of Los Angeles.
—John & Bella