REGIONAL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF RURAL ALTERNATIVES - THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Mark Feedman and Chela Lightchild studied together at Covelo with Alan Chadwick and in, 1976, took their skills and their teacher’s legacy into the international sustainable development community. For the next twenty-five years, they established intensive-biodynamic demonstration and training gardens in Honduras, England, Dominican Republic and New Mexico. Feedman and Lightchild’s work led Save the Children to commit to organic intensive gardening programs in a number of countries, including Malawi, Indonesia, and Haiti. In England, they trained international rural workers who returned inspired to Africa, India, Philippines, Latin America, among other places. In the Dominican Republic, they founded CREAR and developed the Barefoot Agronomist Program, a three-year vocational school to educate farmers and rural youth in sustainable small-scale hillside farming, intensive-biodynamic agriculture, and soil conservation.