 The Resilience Hub is a non-profit organization focused on permaculture education, growing healthy food, and building community. Carol has been a great pillar in her community and neighborhood. She's a very well-educated woman, and she's really given back to the community as a professor, a mentor, and she just has a very lovely soul. And when you meet Carol, you feel warm and welcome and happy. I heard about the Resilience Hub and through someone who was visiting a friend. And so I had her come and interview me for designing a much larger garden around the house. Once I started talking to her about what permaculture was all about, I decided I wanted to do that kind of gardening. And it was paying attention to a lot more than just your garden. And the sort of symbol they use is that permaculture is about earth care, people care, and sharing with others. And so I think that sharing is thought about in a lot of different ways by different people, but for me it was sharing. I had time, I had the money to set this up, you know, and I could share the food I grew. Her involvement in the Resilience Hub has really been amazing. From the time that she's lived in Portland to moving out to Freeport, she's continued to support several efforts that the Resilience Hub has been involved in. I've been volunteering with the Resilience Hub since 2012 and I have taken several classes including in a permaculture design class, an advanced permaculture design class. And I was really thrilled when I found the Resilience Hub in Portland. And I lived in the city and I was a renter so I didn't have any land. So I wasn't able to practice what I was learning, but through the permabletses I went to all these different properties and saw how on very small scales to really large scales I could put it all into action. I share my garden with my neighbors and, you know, anytime there's a surplus, you know, I'm looking for people to share it with. And so, and it's lovely because people enjoy bringing their kids over and checking out the strawberries and going pick the raspberries. I mean, these are important things for kids and so I get to know the kids in the neighborhood as well. But we got really lucky because I found this place on the Moffko website and people had this property and they really wanted to make it into a really great community space but they just had too many small children and it just didn't work with their lifestyle and they really wanted to sell it to somebody who was going to take it and do like things like the permablets. Our goal is to sustain our family and then the resilience hub does wants to do another project where they do weekly work parties where people come out and learn a project but then they also get a common share so the food we grow will kind of be split almost like a public, like a community garden but it'll be like to form those relationships over time. I mean, I've never seen a group of people so willing to work hard, I mean, no one's standing around, working hard, bringing their skills. A lot of people knew how to do things, I mean, run machines. I didn't know how to run, you know, cutting wood, things like that and food is part of my sense of myself. I love doing it, raising it, making it work, you know, in the sense of being a successful gardener. When the permablets was done here it was really exciting and we were very fortunate because we had had an advanced permaculture design class come out and do a design for our property so we got to take five different designs and kind of pull them together and then figure out what would be the most helpful for us at this time to have done and I think over 40 people came out and they just didn't stop working for eight hours and they did more than we would have expected. We had a lot of younger folks helping lead projects and they were so excited to learn about solar and composting. The best reason to get involved in permablets is the people that you meet are incredible and they're so giving and they have this other sort of, they all come from different backgrounds within this sort of capitalistic structure. They all have different skill sets but when they get here, they're all kind of like at the same level. After I did the permaculture thing I also became a master gardener. I mean I took the University of Maine's gardening, volunteer gardening course and through that I learned more about Hover's for Hunger. I had been looking for something like that ever since I retired. It was a question of giving back and what are you going to do? I thought about joining Habitat for Humanity but after two years of night classes I decided I wasn't that good at it so the garden was coming along and it just made sense. I mean I watched other people do it and thought well you can do this too and that first year I mean I think there was about 300 pounds of food that I brought over. The people that we've done this for have been really grateful and thrilled and very overwhelmed. I've seen a lot of people cry at the end of a blitz. They all wanted to like have everyone stay a little bit longer and like share food or drinks or in a fire. I've seen them throughout the years after even whether at blitzes or just in town and there's like a comradery between us even though we've only maybe only known each other for six hours of the day. And then there's also every year there's all new people coming in to the blitzes and it's always very similar energy. People are very open to learning and grateful and want to help. It's just the spirit. The spirit's the word I use all the time. It's a spirit of we can do this. You know a spirit of helpfulness and I've just never seen it before.