Mission
Gather & Grow provides alternatives to capitalism & commodification by creating herbal offerings and spaces grounded in access, relationships, and liberation.
Building relationships with plants helps us remember that we have all the tools to live healthy, fulfilling lives without contributing to climate destruction or racial capitalism.
Values
Access
Herbs are the people's medicine. Everyone should be able to affordably access herbal knowledge, skills, and materials. We resist individual ownership of land and plants, and reject profit-driven herbal medicine and education. Instead, we're working towards a Gift Economy model, inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer, where we exchange time, skills, goods, and labor to build a world based on community care.
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Relationships, Reciprocity, and Repair
Humans are meant to be in relationships with each other and the Earth. Gather & Grow is committed to building healthy relationships grounded in reciprocity, respect, and collective action through the exchange of knowledge, skills, and goods.
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We all have the capacity to enact harm, and conflict is inevitable. Many of our society’s spaces, including our criminal legal system, aren't designed to holistically address harm or provide adequate repair. People deserve communities where harm is acknowledged, and relationships are restored through repair and changed behavior. Gather & Grow strives to be a space committed to harm repair and conflict resolution. We'll get it wrong sometimes, and we promise to hold ourselves accountable.
Liberation
We live in a society steeped in historical trauma and ongoing oppression that impacts all of us, though some more directly than others. Those with historically dominant identities bear significant responsibility for upending these systems.
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Gather & Grow is committed to addressing racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and other forms of oppression when they occur. We recognize that oppression exists at multiple levels requiring different interventions, and that responding to injustice can inadvertently sustain other oppressions. We reject solutions that uphold colonialism, capitalism, or carceral logic.
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Our People
Christina is an educator, organizer, and herbalist living in Saugerties, NY. They have worked as an elementary teacher and curriculum writer for the last decade, creating lessons, classroom structures, and school-wide systems that center healing-centered pedagogy, restorative practices, and honest and accurate history. They are passionate about working in the community to abandon logics, practices, and structures of punishment and extraction, while also collaborating to bring about alternatives rooted in justice, reciprocity, and care.
Along with running Gather & Grow, they serve on the board of Land to Learn and are a member of Patchwork Studios, an artist-run studio and events space in Newburgh, NY. They were a core member of Building Antiracist White Educators from 2020 to 2024.
Christina Noyes
Founder
Jill Teitsworth
Sprouts Educator
Jill has worked for over a decade as an art teacher and early childhood educator and is currently taking a sabbatical from teaching to be a stay-at-home mom. She has worked in progressive independent schools both in New York City and upstate, primarily spending her time with children ages 2 through 6.
As a teacher, Jill views her students as partners in learning. Their ideas, interests, and play form the foundation for the curriculum, which is always emergent and unique to each group of children. Jill enjoys sharing her interests in gardening, foraging, and textile art with her students, and she weaves social and emotional learning, environmental awareness, and social justice into all of her work.
She holds a Master's in Developmental Psychology from Teacher's College at Columbia University.
Ashley is an Early Childhood Educator, certified yoga teacher, and budding herbalist. She is currently the 3's Lead Teacher at Hudson Highlands Nature Center, an outdoor play-based program located in Cornwall, NY. She integrates play, movement, and song to cultivate wonder and joy in learning environments.
Ashley is passionate about holding space for adults and children to foster curiosity, love, respect, and connection with one another and the elements.
Ashley Lamphere
Seedlings Educator