2025 Program Highlights

Despite a year of financial uncertainty, Land Together’s programs have remained strong and deeply rooted, thanks to the dedication of our participants, staff, and supporters like you. In 2025, we served hundreds of participants through 12 programs across nine California state prisons and provided comprehensive reentry services to program graduates in 14 counties statewide. From vibrant new gardens and historic farmers markets to groundbreaking research and reentry partnerships, our community has turned challenge into momentum.

Below are just some of the many ways your support made a lasting impact in 2025:

🌻 Garden Expansion and Innovation
We built a new 14-bed Sustainable Agriculture Training Garden at the California Institution for Women, added raised beds at the California Health Care Facility, installed a new garden in San Quentin’s Lower Yard, and expanded the 35,000-square-foot gardens at Central California Women’s Facility with participant-designed beds—creating more space across California prisons for education, healing, and food production. We also institutionalized composting across all program sites. At eight prisons, formal partnerships with prison kitchens now allow participants to compost kitchen scraps for use in the gardens.   

🥬 Nutritious Food for Women in Intensive Mental Health Care
When 16 raised beds were donated to our program at the California Institution for Women, LT program graduates named them “The Giving Gardens” and volunteered to grow herbs and veggies for women in the Psychiatric Inpatient Program. In partnership with PIP kitchen staff, women in the unit, who have never before had access to produce grown at CIW, are now receiving nutritious meals made with fresh ingredients.

🌎 Environmental Justice Leadership
We launched a new project amplifying the leadership and voices of incarcerated women on environmental and climate justice issues within prisons.  The project will train 50 incarcerated participants over two years through a 48-week leadership program focused on climate impacts in prisons, community-led solutions, and systems change. Participants will develop and present policy recommendations to decision-makers, culminating in listening sessions, a published report with actionable recommendations, and a statewide briefing to advance climate resilience and environmental justice in California prisons.

🍅 First-Ever Prison Farmers Markets
Land Together hosted historic farmers markets at Central California Women’s Facility featuring produce grown in LT gardens, supplemented by offerings from local farms. Thousands of incarcerated people accessed fresh, organic food—over 15,000 pounds distributed so far—and shared in the joy of these inspiring gatherings.

🦋 Citizen Science and Climate Education
Among other projects, this year, at Avenal State Prison, a PhD candidate from UC Santa Barbara worked with participants to monitor precipitation and weather patterns in the prison garden, studying how climate change affects rainfall intensity and frequency while comparing their data with official weather station records. At California Health Care Facility, participants collaborated with UC Davis faculty on bird monitoring and climate education, launched the Great Sunflower Project to track pollinators, and created a participatory field guide to the birds of CHCF. As one participant reflected, “We’re building something for the outside world to learn from, and for the people in here, too. That feels good.”

🌾 Seeds for the Future
We launched the Land Together Seed Bank, soon expanding across all nine prison sites, to preserve plant diversity, strengthen food security, and teach self-sufficiency. Seeds saved by participants are shared among facilities, partner farms, and reentry home gardens, connecting communities inside and out.

🎨 Healing Through Creativity
At Central California Women’s Facility, participants co-created a cookbook that blends recipes, stories, and photography, capturing how growing and preparing food in prison becomes an act of care, creativity, and resistance. At Avenal State Prison, participants designed and painted a large-scale mural that transformed a barren wall into a vibrant expression of hope and resilience. And at California Institution for Women, participants collected, pressed, and mounted dried plants to create the first-ever prison garden herbarium.

🥕 Cultivating Nourishment
Across our program sites, participants cultivated lush gardens alive with food, herbs, and flowers—living classrooms where nourishment and beauty thrive. Rows of kale, tomatoes, peppers, and beans grew beside beds of basil, mint, lavender, and calendula, attracting butterflies and pollinators. These vibrant spaces nourish body and spirit alike, fostering ecosystems of care, learning, and resilience.

💻 Spanish-Speaking Virtual Support  
Land Together launched new Spanish-Speaking Virtual Support Meetings, now held regularly across California, Mexico, and Central America. Participants connect across borders for supportive conversations, learning digital tools, and building community. These meetings are part of a broader effort that also includes one-on-one system navigation and emergency housing assistance for individuals who have been deported or are returning to Mexico and Central America.

🛠️ Workforce Partnerships and Career Pathways
This year, we completed the planning phase of a bold new initiative in partnership with California State Parks: the CA Parks Career Pathways program, a two-year pilot designed to open long-overdue doors for formerly incarcerated individuals to access careers in public land stewardship. 

🏠 Rental Assistance Program
Land Together launched a new Rental Assistance Program as part of our holistic wraparound reentry services. The program provides short-term rental coverage directly to landlords. Participants receive gradual step-down support that encourages financial independence, along with group housing stability workshops and one-on-one financial literacy coaching to build budgeting skills and long-term savings.

🌄 Healing Nature Excursions
We launched monthly nature-based retreats that bring participants, and their families, into restorative outdoor settings for mindfulness, learning, and reconnection. Co-led by reentry and in-prison program staff, these ecotherapy excursions strengthen continuity between the inside and outside and demonstrate nature’s profound role in healing and recovery. Excursions included hiking, kayaking, overnight camping, and more. 

📚 Research and Publications: Advancing the Field
Two PhD dissertations and a master’s thesis featured Land Together’s work and impact, exploring themes from employability and mental health to climate change and reentry outcomes. This year, a Land Together staff member also authored a full chapter in a published book on the healing power of gardens.

When we build our gardens, they offer a sense of peace, and almost, of freedom. So many times our participants tell us, “When we’re working in the garden, touching the earth, smelling the flowers, watching praying mantis, toads, and hummingbirds visit our garden, it feels like freedom, like being out in the world.     I can imagine the trees, the birds, the water. It distracts me from being here, even if just for a few moments. 
—Excerpt from the LT chapter in Grown with Love: Inspiring Garden Stories by Kelli Davis Peas

Together, these stories show that Land Together is more than the sum of its programs—it’s a movement rooted in resilience, creativity, and care. Across nine prison sites and through reentry services statewide, each garden bed built, seed saved, home secured, and story shared reflects the strength of our community and the power of collective action. As we look ahead, we remain committed to cultivating healing spaces, advancing environmental justice, and expanding opportunities for all who have been impacted by incarceration. Thank you for walking with us, believing in this work, and helping our community continue to grow, together.