One of our community values is self-reliance, so every dollar we make goes to paying a dignified wage to our Neighbors and to building the Village so that our community can grow and bring more people off of the streets.

When you adopt one of our arrangements you are bringing home a friend you won’t find anywhere else. Our arrangements are not just plants in a pot, they are creative expressions of the values and experiences of Neighbors in our community.

 

A “Neighbor” is a person who lives at The Other Side Village -- a community built by, and for, people who’ve lived much of their lives on the streets and who often have significant mental health challenges, personal trauma, or histories of substance abuse. Each of our Neighbors has their own story unique that they are working on processing, making sense of, and ultimately, taking control of.

 

Our arrangement business gives our Neighbors a chance to step back from their story and process pieces of it in a different way. As those of us who work in the dirt know, caring for plants and soil is itself therapeutic. But the real beauty of the arrangement process is that it’s also an outlet for self-expression – a nonverbal way to approach parts of our past that have been especially painful or scary and interpret them in a new light. To make sense of trauma and loss that many of us tried to bury because we didn’t have the space or safety or energy to deal with it at the time.

 

Taking these experiences and turning them into something beautiful is an act of intense bravery and vulnerability, which is what you are getting when you adopt an arrangement from The Other Side Village.