The Official Website for:
Kindred
Creative Residence & Agro-ForesT
Our Goals
On this beautiful life journey, our goal as a BIPOC led, LGBTQIA+ welcoming, space is to create a fully inclusive and safe environment for community learning, to help re-align and re-balance our relationship to nature. We seek to transform our current relationship to our natural world by learning about the sustainable practices of our Afro-Indigenous ancestors & agroecology, while incorporating a more balanced approach into our daily lives. We can learn to live in harmony with our natural surroundings and cultivate abundance for ourselves and all the life on our planet. By teaching our youth to love and appreciate the natural world around them, they will learn to thrive and create abundance for themselves and the generations that come after them.
Farm a Yard
Of native fruits and vegetables
Grow food and medicine in your existing yard and experience the health benefits of eating what you produce at home. iThrough interdisciplinary, hands on (and, in the dirt) lessons, children and adults learn about the importance of seed saving, promoting native plants, and observing what is already growing around you.
Learn
To tap into your creativity
We offer outdoor painting and drawing classes that focus on developing observational skills and practice in expressive mark making.
With a focus on the use of sustainable, non-toxic materials and practices to reduce and eliminate our use of harmful chemicals, that negatively impact our health and the health of our planet.
Take a Break
To explore the land
Enjoy the quiet of the forest and disconnect from the everyday, by camping in your own tent in the fields or on a tent platform. Not ready to rough it? Stay in the three season tent, or in the Yurt!
​
Enjoy the land and the woods for an overnight, or weekend retreat.
Nina I. Buxenbaum
Nina Buxenbaum (she/her) was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY to a politically active, multi-racial household. She received her MFA degree in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in drawing and printmaking.
Ms. Buxenbaum has been an artist and educator for her entire career. First certified as a K-12 Art teacher in New York, she has been teaching at the college level since 2001. She is a Tenured Professor of Painting at York College, CUNY as well as a member, and faculty, at The Silvermine Artist Guild in New Canaan, CT, and Co-Founder of the KINDRED Creative Residence & Agro-ForesT, a BIPOC led inclusive community based on democratic principles and sustainability, integrating the creative arts and permaculture, through project/place based education.
​
Apprentice Earth
Jody Massa
Jody Massa (she/her) is a professional After School and children’s Camp teacher. She has been collaborating with children as they learn since she was 13 years old. She has a BA in Elementary Education from Smith College and a MA in Community Education from Goddard College. Cooking, planting, crafting and mud days are her favorite ways to spend the summer. As a child, her favorite thing to do was climb a tree and sit and dream.
So as an adult, Jody can’t imagine anything better than being in the woods playing
imaginative games with children.
Roberto C. Zapata
Born in Norwalk CT, Roberto Zapata is a first generation son of parents from Costa Rica and Colombia. At a very young age Roberto learned how to work with his hands. He has had a long history of wood working and construction. Roberto is a passionate builder, designer, and creator. He apprenticed with an arborist for three years, learning rigging, SRT climbing, and proper tree pruning. He has independently pursued the study of tree, plant, and mushroom medicines.
In 2015 Roberto started a community garden project, Meadows Garden Pride in the Norwalk public housing complex where he lived. Through the use of Hürgelkelur he created garden beds that required no tilling, fertilizing, or irrigation, thus eliminating many outputs. From 2017-2018, Roberto led campers ages 8-18, and adults of all ages, in foraging, plant identification, and medicinal plant harvesting classes at Holmes Camp & Retreat Center. In 2018 he earned his permaculture certification, he is currently on the Board of Directors of The Unadilla Community Farm, in Unadilla, NY, and Co-Founder of the KINDRED Creative Residence & Agro-ForesT, in Fletcher, VT. Recipient of the 2023-2024 Braiding Seeds Fellowship from Soul Fire Farm.
