Lisa Waud is a collaborative, large-scale floral and installation artist who likes to invite people in to enjoy flowers, and from there into a conversation about the world, she was the artist behind the 2015 Flower House Detroit – a floral phenomenon in downtown Detroit. Erin Preston-Johnson Bevel is an unschooling mom, a full-time lecturer at Howard University, and a “recovering lawyer” putting her legal experience to work advocating within her Detroit community.

She serves on the board of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which came together with two other longstanding food advocacy groups - Keep Growing Detroit and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm - to create the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. The DBFLF was co-founded by Erin, Jerry Hebron, Tepfirah Russian, and Dr. Shakara Tyler; the Fund officially launched on Juneteenth 2020.

Both Lisa and Erin are advocates and voices for community, integrity, and a healthy regrowing and interweaving of community and land, of growing thoughtfully and intergenerationally into our collective futures. 

This is the story of that time when Flower House Detroit decided its next chapter was in the embrace of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, where it would grow up into a Children’s Sensory Garden for the community.

Having just completed Black History Month and just entered Women’s History Month, this seemed like the perfect - floral and restoration - tale to share forward. Enjoy.

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The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.