Enchanted Place aspires to re-generate harmony and compassion in human-planet co-existence. This season, we've been answering it in Maple Ridge. In partnership with the City of Maple Ridge Parks & Recreation, we lead guided forest immersion experiences. You'll find us in the Summer Programming Guide, where participants consistently report the same three things: a deeper connection to the land, a return of their own creativity, and a stronger sense of belonging to their community. We have learned that these are not three outcomes. They are one outcome. Belonging to land and belonging to community are the same capacity, practiced in different directions. A farm, a physical center, is where the vision becomes daily life. What We Are Proposing to Grow We are seeking land to root a working farm at the centre of an intergenerational community of practice: a place where food, healing, and learning share soil. On this land, aspiring farmers with a focus on youth seeking a real economic pathway into climate action grow food as their first livelihood. Farming is climate action you can eat, measure, and be paid for. For a young person priced out of every conventional path to land and purpose, a farm apprenticeship is economic mobility and ecological literacy in the same set of hands. On the same land, our experienced forest bathing guides lead the practices we are known for: forest immersion. The generation with the most time on the land teaches presence; the generation with the most future at stake grows the food. Each holds a livelihood the other makes possible. The farm feeds the gatherings. The gatherings sustain the farm. More Than a Farm We are honest that we are proposing more than agriculture. This is a community, a social initiative, and a place of healing, and we believe that is precisely what farmland is for. The land will be inclusive by design: programming for immigrant communities, for whom a farm gate can be a doorway into Canadian belonging; and a standing commitment to Indigenous ways of being: we operate on unceded territories, we work in relationship with local Nations, and knowledge keepers hold cultural protocol authority over how land practice is taught and shared here. And the land will give back structurally, not sentimentally: ten percent of the farm's profits return annually to the local community, directed to education, mental health, and climate action. What We Bring to a Land Partnership We bring proven programming with a municipal partner, a trained and insured practitioner network, a business model with experience revenue and food revenue steward the site together. Land teaches slowly. We plan to stay long enough to be taught. We are not asking for land to hold an idea. We are asking for land to hold a practice, of growing, of healing, of handing something down. That, as far as we can tell, is what a farm has always been.
Large forested area with fertile soil, fungi network, and sectioned area for organic vegetable farming