why food forests in puerto rico?
over 85% of food in Puerto Rico is imported?
Strengthen Food Security
While one quarter-acre food forest cannot feed the whole community, it serves as inspiration and a demonstration of how abundant permaculture food forests can be.
These food forests also offer diverse genetic resources for community members to take seeds and cuttings to start their own gardens.
Empower Local Communities
Foster community engagement by collaborating with local residents in designing, maintaining, and harvesting - promoting collective ownership and responsibility.
Educate Students & Youth
Food forests serve as living classrooms, connecting kids to where their food comes from and teaching students about sustainability & environmental stewardship.
By inspring our youth to connect with these food spaces and gain practical skills, we ensure long-term community and ecological resilience.
Inspire Others to Plant
Every food forest inspires people to take action in their own backyards, starting their journey toward sustainability. By engaging with our project, individuals learn how simple actions can make a lasting impact.
Create Collaborative Community Spaces
These natural, living spaces foster stronger social connections and collaboration, offering a peaceful environment for education and shared experiences.
Our Vision
Raise $100,000 to build 10 Food Forests
These funds will support the design, installation, training, and support necessary to create 10 fully functioning community food forests.
Educate 10 community anchors
Each food forest will have at least one resident of the community that will serve as the "anchor" for the project, to ensure the long-term care and success.
We will work directly with each anchor to offer upfront training classes as well as connecting all the community anchors together to create a network of food park managers.
Support ongoing education
We will offer additional workshops and trainings for food forest anchors and community residents to learn how to cultivate, maintain, and expand food forests.
Create sustainability for future generations
Ensuring that every food forest becomes a living, breathing testament to community resilience, environment regeneration, and the power of donor-supported initiatives.
Creating a Food Forest is no easy task, luckily, we have practice.
It takes one person to change a community!
In Colorado, we met that person. Her name is Stephanie Syson and she worked tirelessly to transform a previously unused plot to a permaculture food forest.
Excerpt from the Permaculture Action Network. Read more here
The Basalt Food Garden was just the 5th public Food Forest in the United States.
Stephanie Syson planned and implemented the project, including gaining the backing of local leaders. She was able to work with stakeholders and ensure all concerns were addressed, including those of homeless populations and bears that might be frequent visitors to the site.
The park features not only an edible Food Forest, but a seed saving garden too. Locals can come and get fresh food, cuttings, or seeds to bring back to their homes and plant themselves.
Who is the Caribbean Agroforestry Institute?
The Caribbean Agroforestry Institute (CAI), is based on a 35 acre off grid farm and homestead in Camuy, Puerto Rico. Stephanie and Dan started CAI in 2020 after falling in love with the island. They are passionate about off grid living, permaculture, biodynamics, clean water, regenerating soil, growing healthy food, cultivating healing herbs and sharing their passion with others.
Caribbean Agroforestry Institute’s (CAI) mission is to research, demonstrate and educate in the fields of agroforestry and other ecological practices in support of people, pollinators and plants.
We are an agricultural educational nonprofit that offers technical courses to train students to design, implement and manage diverse agroforestry systems in the tropics and across the world. Some of our programs equip students to transform their home gardens and farms into abundant food producing landscapes, while other programs are designed to train students to manage commercial farms for themselves or their employer.
We utilize over a dozen other local instructors in our classes. To learn more about our teaching team, click here.
Stephanie Syson
Co-Founder & Director
Stephanie Syson, co-founder and Director of Caribbean Agroforestry Institute, spends the days with her hands in the soil and her heart with the plants. She started down her Permaculture path in 2001 with an internship at Punta Mona in Costa Rica. After visiting and living at multiple Permaculture communities in Latin America she was hooked! Stephanie lived within and managed the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute for 4 years. In that time she started the Basalt Seed Library and the Basalt Community Food Park as well as opening an herbal Product line called Dynamic Roots. After many years of farming and running her herbal product business, she decided to devote herself fully to farming medicinal herbs.
Stephanie partnered with Sustainable Settings Ranch in Carbondale Colorado and opened Biodynamic Botanicals in 2015. She is a full-time farmer and educator. She has recently started 35 acre farm in Puerto Rico that combines her love of medicinal herbs, agroforestry, subsistence farming, tropical climates and ocean life with teaching and rural, large scale Permaculture Design.
Stephanie is a Certified Permaculture Designer, an educator in the fields of Greenhouse Management, Seed Saving, Food Forests, Biodynamics, Herbalism and more. She has presented at conferences such as the Boulder Bioneers, the North American Permaculture Convergence, the American Herbalists Guild and the Biodynamic Association. She works with groups of all ages to further their knowledge of these topics through regular public workshops such as CRMPI, Colorado Mountain College, The Grow Network, and the Denver Permaculture Guild as well as co-hosting the Living Permaculture Show, a monthly radio show on public radio KDNK. Stephanie is committed to community service through education and demonstration of herbal self-care and sustainable farming practices.
Daniel Whitney
Co-Founder
Daniel, co-founder of Caribbean Agroforestry Institute, has his foundational roots in sustainable energy design with experience in mechanical systems including water, energy, and manufacturing. An engineer by education, he enjoys a diverse amount of creative endeavors to sharpen his skillset. Through design, manufacturing, machine repair, construction, irrigation techniques, sustainable systems designs.
With a Bachelors of Science degree from Colorado State University, Daniel has been active in Engineers Without Borders, working with water distribution projects in San Salvador, El Salvador, and a water filtration project for a community of 3,000 people in rural Tanzania. Through PhD level coursework in Energy Systems Manufacturing, Daniel worked in developing a thin-filmed photovoltaic manufacturing process at the Next Generation PV Center & the High Energy Physics and Plasma Engineering Lab of the Engineering Research Laboratories in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Throughout the 2000’s he moved to practical applications of these technologies as a solar electric design engineer in residential and commercial projects. Holding certifications from the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP) with licenses in both Installation and Sales, worked with Ecosystems Designs and the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute (CRMPI) in Basalt, Colorado, as well as Third Millennium Alliance at the Jama-Coaqui research station outside of Pedernales, Ecuador. Mr. Whitney’s most recent project includes the successful design and installation of a 3,000 cubic foot crop dehydration unit for Biodynamic Botanicals, LLC, funded through a grant from the Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE). Highlights from this project include renewable electrical energy systems in a mobile and replaceable design while maintaining a finished product of the highest quality and efficiency. In its first season of use, this system doubled the companies sales.