Puerto Rico's Food Sovereignty Fund

In 2025 we continued to promote green solutions for the communities served through our food sovereignty fund. In Caguas, Puerto Rico, we began our 3-year plan for environmental awareness with a carefully designed, managed, and led urban reforestation project driven by local community members. We held workshops around topics of flora and fauna, soil quality, climate change, extreme heat, plant care, water harvesting, and the importance of promoting green solutions in urban areas, particularly with the intention of bringing visibility to alternative food opportunities.

With the community in Rio Piedras, we co-designed a compost based on the criteria to promote functionality, durability, and integration into the garden environment. The design ensured workflow, adequate ventilation, and direct connection to the existing vegetation in the space to ensure its shared use. Your donations allowed La Maraña to contribute $5,000 to Huerto Semilla for the implementation of the composting system.

In 2026 we strive to continue holding meetings, workshops and developing educational tools so learnings can be replicated. We want to install community nursery gardens with rainwater harvesting and composting areas with participatory design, like we did in Huerto Feliz in Caguas.

We appreciate all of the support you provided to our Food Sovereignty Fund in 2025 because you allowed us to expand the intention of our work and enter the urban landscape with intention of motivating people, schools, communities and municipalities to consider that food growth can be within their reach.

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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