There is a stretch of land at Star Bear Ranch where something old is being remembered.

Not invented. Remembered. How to grow food in relationship with the soil. How to heal in community instead of in isolation. How to move through the year by its ceremonies. The empire spent five hundred years trying to make us forget all of it. We are planting it back.

Wóžu means to "moving plants" or "gardens" in Lakota.

Star Bear Ranch in Elbert County, Colorado is the first pilot and the hub of everything that comes after. Before there can be programs there has to be a place. So that is what this year is. We are building the ground itself.

That means mound culture farms and greenhouses so the land can feed the people who tend it and make our food medicine again. A buffalo prairie, returning the relative the plains were emptied of. A ceremonial grounds, so the ceremony comes home to land that can hold it. Housing and infrastructure for the staff and volunteers who will live and work here. This is the slow, ordinary, sacred labor of making a place tangible.

It also means a team that is financially supported. The empire runs on unpaid, underpaid and under resourced Native labor and Wóžu refutes that. Your financial support staffs the people who plant the beds, raise the structures, tend the prairie and hold the relationships a project like this lives or dies on.

This is Phase One. In 2027 the land opens into its full purpose. Capacity Care instead of mental health, shifting from individual healing, to village based healing. The Living Soil Residency, shifting from community building to village building. Earth School for the children. Mycelial economic based co-operatives so everyone flourishes and thrives. Land-based healing for the people the system was built to break. We are not launching those programs on a foundation of nothing. We are building the foundation first, in the open, so it can be carried to the next site and the next.

Because what is built here builds the network. A second garden is already taking root on Native-owned land in Kyle, South Dakota. Three more sites stand open for application to any Indigenous-led community with land and a vision. One garden is a project. A network is a future no one can take back.

We are raising one million dollars as a bridge while the grant funding moves. The crowdfund is not only the money. It is the proof that tells every foundation watching that the community already showed up.

THE LAND WE ARE STEWARDING

About Star Bear Ranch

65 Acres. Star Bear Ranch, Elbert, Colorado: home of Wóžu Healing Gardens and stewarded by a Lakota Oglala woman.

West Bijou Creek running through the heart of it. Visions of A Ceremonial Area. A Polycentric Food Forest & Greenhouse. Buffalo & Horse Prairie. Equine Therapy grounds. Space for staff to live, rest, and do the work.

This isn't a concept. This isn't a vision board. This land exists and we have sat in ceremony asking how we can be in right relation. And the land has asked us to build something on it that will outlast all of us.

FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY

Where the money goes

This campaign funds seven months at Star Bear Ranch in Elbert, Colorado, from June through December of 2026. The work splits into two halves that hold each other up. The first half is the people and the programming. The second half is the land and the structures that will stand on it.

The first half comes to $493,000, and most of it is wages. Two co-executive directors and two program directors lead the farming, the sustainability planning and the business development that has to be solid before any of this can last, at $84,000 for each pair across the seven months. Eleven support staff carry the social media, the administration, the grant writing, the tech coordination, the community outreach, the donor relationships and the accounting that keep a young organization upright, at $175,000. Paying people properly is not overhead. It is the entire point. The empire runs on unpaid and underpaid Indigenous labor and Wóžu was built to refute that.

Five percent of the campaign, $50,000, goes directly to a Native Elder and Youth Grant, held and distributed by the community it names. Two percent, $20,000, goes to our Omprakash partnership, which opens the work to international volunteers and service-learners and grounds us in a global network of land-based healing.

The rest of the first half is the living programming. $20,000 for agriculture and education, which is seeds and tools and curriculum and the stewards who teach it. $15,000 for cultural and ceremonial work, which is elder honoraria and ceremony and the veterans who come to the land to mend. $15,000 for harm reduction and wellness, including an access fund so no one is turned away for lack of money. $12,000 for the gatherings that turn neighbors into a community, the harvest festival and the retreats and the workshops. $18,000 for the communications that let the world know this is real. The Capacity Care and Mycelial Frameworks curricula are already built, and we have deferred their rollout to 2027 so this year stays focused on getting solid ground under our feet.

The second half targets $507,000, and it is the infrastructure that turns a vision into a place you can stand. $200,000 for the bunkhouse, so people have somewhere to sleep. $30,000 for a Trillium Dome dwelling. $87,400 for the tools and equipment the first phase of the farm cannot run without. Then topsoil, gravel roadbase and concrete flooring at $80,000 combined, because a garden begins below the surface long before anything grows above it. The kitchen and the septic system are quoted and pending. Those two numbers, when they land, will close the gap between $890,400 of confirmed commitment and the million-dollar goal.

The remaining room is not padding. It is the room to move when the unexpected arrives, to seed the second garden on Native-owned land in Kyle and to keep the lights on long enough for earned revenue to begin carrying its own weight by Year Three.

For more information visit : www.wozugardens.org/crowdfund

BREAKDOWN · 7 MONTHS · JUN–DEC 2026

You were told that a place like this was impossible, and we are asking you to help us prove that the impossibility was always a story told in someone else’s interest, so that together we might plant the medicine, grow the village and compost the empire, which is in the end all that the word Wóžu has ever asked of us, which is to plant, and in the planting, nourish the world again.

GIFT TIERS

When you contribute, we build a reciprocal relationship

For more information visit : www.wozugardens.org/crowdfund

All donations are tax-exempt from our fiscal sponsor, Omprakash.

For more information visit : www.wozugardens.org/crowdfund

Fiscally Sponsored by OmprakashEIN: 20-8655418 | https://www.omprakash.org/

Wóžu Healing Gardens

An Indigenous-Led Global Movement for Land-Based Healing

COMMUNITY · HEALING · SOVEREIGNTY

Wóžu Healing Gardens

An Indigenous-Led Global Movement for Land-Based Healing

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