Tiny Hike Grassroots Co-op

  Cultivating Community Spirit and Green Thumbs My role as a parent is to cultivate, nurture, and raise tiny human beings who are considerate, responsible, and conscious of the world they inhabit. During our park day in Franklin we discovered a community garden. It was great! Much bigger than our own two raised garden beds, this little paradise of flowers, herbs and vegetables outnumbered ours by 53 at least. But more than a collection of plants, the community garden is a testament to what like-minded people can achieve when they come together and put their hearts into a shared objective. Upon entering the garden, my kiddo’s eyes shimmered with joy and curiosity. His fingers itched to grab a gardening tool, in this case a watering can, and instinctively, get to some gardening. Here though, every plant had a story and every patch represented someone's hard work, or lack of. We chatted with a woman who was painstakingly removing tiny bugs from a viney plant and pointed out the culp...

  Making Strides in Community Building We kicked off our park days with an event in Douglas MA, hosted by Picnic at the Park, a non-profit organization. It was an uplifting day to spend time as a family at a park enjoying a friendly chat and some sensory activities. Since we embrace the gentle parenting philosophy and focus on child-led activities, a lot of times we go the playground for social opportunities only to wander off into the field or a trail. Playground can get noisy, that I don’t mind, but my kiddo does. At least, sometimes. Other times, he’s happy to parallel play or do some observational play. We’re also not part of any specific community, so striving to create a sense of community for him has been challenging, especially because he’s a covid- kid, a child who spent a portion of his early childhood in isolation and lockdown, as we all did. Some research into community building, because I like to google stuff, showed that building a community requires a dedicated focus...