Before and after spring break for our 2025 UBP Spring Scholars, we joined in laboring alongside Terra Advocati, A Todo Dar Productions, the Traditional Center for Indigenous Knowledge and Healing, and Galeria E.V.A. for Huertos Familiares. You can read more about this vital work on the southside of San Antonio, Texas, and locations from the Midwest to the Southwest, México, and Portugal by following our friends at Terra Advocati to stay up to date on the seeding and evolution of Huertos Familiares:
Huertos Familiares Sprouts!
Our collaboration with these partners offers our UBP scholar students a unique opportunity to engage with existing community collaborations which helps us achieve our transdisciplinary environmental justice goals. Through Terra Advocati’s leadership, these transdisciplinary collaborations help UBP reclaim ecological knowledge in the borderlands, train students in community-engaged research, and create sustainable collaborative university/community partnerships to support local environmental justice initiatives for urban biodiversity and food sovereignty–critical issues that nourish people and our nonhuman kin, including local and migratory birds.
The 2025 UBP Spring Scholars had powerful terms in response as they articulated questions from earlier discussions on community-engagement. Some of those terms that still sit with us are reciprocity, multispecies relationships, access, pledge/oath, and resilience. Early in the semester, one scholar asked, “What happens after the research?” They were inspired to answer their own question after our day of helping build Huertos Familiares. There are additional stories like this from various students. This is why we do what we do. We are honored to collaborate with Terra Advocati. Stay tuned, friends!
