Colectivo Sustento

The Sustento Garden (Huerta Sustento), the community garden of Colectivo Sustento is a space that has become a living, breathing refuge from the city. A place where we resist, where we form bonds and grow community, a space for collective learning. After three years and heaps of work, we need support to develop to the next stage: to increase our self-sustainability, and to advance the educational role of the garden space. That's what this campaign is for.

The Sustento garden nourishes the collective and our community of local supporters with organic products, grown and cared for by our own hands. We are committed to protecting and saving seeds, and respecting the natural planting cycles. This means we have learnt to understand the cycles of the moon and the seasons, and have become aware of the particular development needs of each and every plant in our garden. We see the enormous potential of this space!


We are part of a movement; gradually community organisations are fortifying their work in different urban and rural territories of Chile. Through networking with other Santiago community garden initiatives, we have found that many women and men have preserved local knowledge about plants and their properties, we have learnt from them and applied the knowledge in our garden. Together, we are rebuilding social networks through caring for the earth, caring for our own bodies, and autonomous organisation. We believe this is the way to reconstruct community well-being in a just and equitable way, according to our needs and freedoms.

The Sustento Garden was born in September 2012. We took over the backyard of a collective member's house in San Miguel in the urban metropolis of Santiago, and began to dream. With the help of a local organic farm - Huellas Verdes - we created the first garden design. The garden has undergone many changes since 2012, as has Colectivo Sustento. Using the garden as a base, we have opened up to the local community in our neighbourhood: we established the Verdivereda (footpath garden) in 2013 to promote a return to home vegetable and herb growing, and we run workshops and children's activities at our bimonthly markets. In 2015 we went further afield and ran garden workshops in two juvenile detention centres: this is a continuation of Colectivo Sustento's community theatre work in the Colina 1 prison.


After 3 years, our self-generated strategies - bimonthly community market days (Feria Sustentina), sales of monthly baskets of country to city organic products, as well as seasonal products from our garden (Fair Produce/Víveres Justos) - have created a network of supporters who wish to eat organic and also support an autonomous alternative. We now need extra financial support to develop the process further, to generate more income, and to expand the educational and community possibilities of the garden. This development is not possible at our present level of income.

Project target

The funds will pay part-time wages (20 hours a week) during 10 months for Mariana and Carolina, who are the coordinators of the Sustento Garden. They will design the garden space, oversee the sowing-harvesting cycles, expand our Fair Produce sales, develop the educational potential of the garden, seek funding and coordinate volunteer work. They have been doing this work with only minimum financial retribution over the three years since the garden began. The income we get at the moment from our Fair Produce sales covers water costs and shifts by Colectivo members. We are running this campaign to give a boost to that income over 10 months so that Mariana and Carolina can concentrate on increasing the income possibilities of the garden, as well as its potential as an educational space: that is, to give garden workshops to local schools and local community, to stimulate school garden initiatives, a movement that has been very successful in Australia. The space is not big enough for large production but it is perfect for training.

There are always obstacles in our work. We are very resourceful, for example, all the building materials used in the Sustento garden have been retrieved from the streets around the house. Also, Colectivo Sustento constantly comes up against the difficulties of working in institutions such as prisons and juvenile detention. Our driving force is the resilience and persistence of the collective members. This is our great strength, we are convinced that we are on the road to creating social change in our own small way, providing a model for others and always dreaming new and viable ideas. We hope this aim is also important for you.