Refuge, Restoration and Sustenance
Drinking Gourd is a Black-led community church committed to land stewardship, food justice and spiritual restoration.
Our Mission
Drinking Gourd is a Black-led community church committed to faith-based programs for land stewardship, food justice, and spiritual restoration.
Through farming, ceremony, and community care, we work to grow and share healthy food with communities in Oakland that have historically been excluded from access to nourishing food. At the same time, we cultivate spaces where people can reconnect with land, plants, ancestors, and the healing wisdom of the natural world.
Our work centers communities that rarely have access to rest, retreat, or land-based healing spaces.
Our Programs
Seed & Soil Circle
Communal gatherings where we learn from the earth, from the ancestors, from one another. We share seeds, stories, songs, and cultivate our relationship with the living world.
Harvest & Healing Pathways
Workshops, retreats, and community gatherings that integrate land-based labor with embodied reflection—so that the act of growing becomes the act of healing.
Generations Rising
A mentorship and apprenticeship initiative dedicated to youth, formerly incarcerated persons, frontline workers, and those transitioning from foster care. Here, farming is metaphor and practice; freedom is cultivated in the soil, in the community, in the self.
Sacred Gatherings & Community Altars
Seasonal festivals, music, storytelling, and movement practices where our spiritual traditions (both inherited and emergent) meet land, culture, and collective imagination.
“They said the sky was not a ceiling but a map …”
Click here to read The Story Behind Our Name
The Story of the Drinking Gourd
The Drinking Gourd was the constellation used by enslaved people as a guide to freedom along the Underground Railroad. By following the Big Dipper toward the North Star, people found their way north.
For us, the Drinking Gourd symbolizes guidance, resilience, and the enduring connection between land, sky, and liberation.