by Ann Armbrecht, SHP Director

I was thrilled to host this conversation with participants in the Sustainable Herbs Program Learning Lab and recent Learning Journey in Appalachia and to hear them share deeply about the impact that these experiences have had on their lives and their work. This work is at the heart of what I am trying to do at the Sustainable Herbs Program and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to share this with others.

I will be sharing highlights from the conversation soon. Our vision and intention for the Learning Journey was to experience  the interconnectedness of not only the challenges facing the herbal products industry but also of our own relationship to those challenges. We wanted to create an embodied experience to help us begin to shift from a human-centric model of competition and extraction to one where we all felt and experienced a sense of interconnectivity with the plants, the place, and others on the journey. As you can tell from the conversation, we are on the journey to doing just that.