PARTNERS AND PROJECTS
Climate Crisis Today
The climate change consequences we face today - heat waves, droughts, floods, forest fires, and pollution - have become too severe for effective isolated solutions. We need to team up, collaborate, and go beyond our too narrowly focused and competitive priorities. We need more partnerships, joint efforts between business, government, non-profits, and individuals working together. This page represents some of the ways we work to help create this kind of an interconnected world and some of the organizations and businesses with potential for creating the most beneficial solutions. As an ever-expanding team, we can meet these environmental challenges, eliminate poverty, and create a more just, sustainable, and regenerative world.
LOCAL ~ Colorado
United Ecology
We work with United Ecology and Avery Ellis on greywater and rainwater, lawn conversions, permaculture landscaping, carbon farming, and regenerative agriculture.
AgroEcological Regeneration (AER)
Design with Nature. Create for the Future. We helped AER with an irrigation design for an innovtive swale and berm project not far from our warehouse in Boulder. It's working really well!
Drylands Agroecology Research
Drylands Agroecology uses regenerative design to transform dry, abandoned, and marginalized landscapes into sustainable ecosystems, with impressive results.
McGuckin Hardware
McGuckin Hardware has carried Blumats since 1989. They help us design packaging for brick-and-mortar stores and give us many marketing ideas.
Boulder Rooted Medicinals
This goji berry farm in Boulder, CO, serves as an educational site for students of the American Institute of Integrative Herbalism. It also became a basecamp for community outreach and conservation center for medicinal plant seed. We donated, designed and installed a highly efficient Growstream irrigation system. Growstream is an innovative drip tape technology that responds to the plant’s roots, and only gives water when the plant asks for it.
Carbon Sponge
A group of artists, scientists, agroecologists, gardeners and educators created Carbon Sponge, a project that researches the potential for urban soils to sequester carbon, decrease greenhouse gases and build healthy soil. We designed an automatic Blumat irrigation system for their exhibit/experiment at the New York Hall of Science.
Earth Love Gardens
For many years, we’ve recommended and supplied irrigation systems for people converting their lawns to gardens. We’ve mainly supported DIY people wanting to install their own irrigation systems. Now, we have a local partner, Earth Love Gardens. They specialize in creating raised garden beds & hoop houses, creating habitats for pollinators, functional landscape designs, and community garden projects. When you use their services, they can additionally install Sustainable Village systems for you in the Boulder-Denver area. We’re working to develop a network of resources like this in every state; so, if you are a resource like this, please contact us.
HerbiCulture Project
We’re working with Catherine Hunziger, founder of WishGarden Herbs on a demonstration garden site designed to support and empower local farmers in ways to become more profitable growing herbal crops.
By marrying agriculture with education, we're nurturing a robust plant community and elevating the sustainability and expertise of our local farmers. Local educational platforms, like herb schools, will have the opportunity to receive hands-on experience with plants and volunteer with farmers.
Alaska Home and Harvest
Working as an agriculture and family services extension agent in Alaska, Anna uses social media platforms to engage her local community, connect them with food resources, and provide education about gardening and home food production. We donated an irrigation system for her to give to her community in a giveaway campaign on social media. Many Alaskans are away from home for long periods of time fishing and hunting and automatic Blumat irrigation enables them to maintain a garden and supplement their diet with fresh vegetables.
INTERNATIONAL
Greenhouse Irrigation
Food was often scarce for the children living in this Tibetan orphanage. We designed and donated a gravity fed drip irrigation system for their greenhouse, to ensure that food was always provided and plentiful, even during periods of drought. Before this project, the children were almost always hungry. Now, the orphanage has more than enough food, and invites the children from the neighboring school to come over for lunch!
Water Access
Utonkon Villages, Nigeria
For Fr. Madu’s community, in the Utonkon villages in Nigeria, water was hard to come by. We assisted Fr. Madu in securing funding for one of our solar well pumps in a joint project with the Claretian Missionaries of Nigeria and St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish in Boulder. This pump provides safe drinking water and irrigation for almost 15,000 Nigerians living near the Ugenge River.
Photovoltaic System
Tibetan Monastery
We installed a Solar PV system installed at a Tibetan Monastery to provide lighting for the 40 resident monks to study religious texts at night. At an elevation of nearly 16,000 feet, the monastery is completely isolated for several months each year due to winter ice and snow and impassable bogs during summer monsoons. This project also provided medical supplies, tools, maintenance equipment and a solar water distiller.
Birthing Clinic
Surmang Monastery, Tibet
The Yushu prefecture on the Chinese-Tibetan border has the highest maternal mortality and infant mortality rates in the world. Electricity in this part of the world is often sparse and hard to come by. We supplied the birthing clinic with a solar electric system and a composting toilet so that they could provide high quality care for the mothers and babies of the region.
Ethnomedicine Preservation Project, Peruvian Amazon
This organization is working to preserve medicinal plant knowledge of indigenous cultures. Its first project was in Peru, working in the Amazon basin and high Andes. Debra St. Claire, Master Herbalist, leads ecological expeditions to their 6000 acre botanical preserve in northeastern Peru. Sustainable Village provided the Project with tools and solar panels.
Gravity Irrigation
Haiti Gravity Project
We supplied gravity watering systems for 500 small farmers in Haiti. Women and children were spending most of their day hauling water, and inefficiently irrigating by dumping it onto the soil. With our inexpensive systems, they only had to make one trip and the water would last several days. The reservoirs irrigate through lengths of BluSoak drip tape, which release water very slowly. This slow drip enables the moisture to penetrate deeper to the root-level as opposed to being wasted due to runoff.
Green World Campaign
Since 2010, the Green World Campaign has planted 4 million biodiverse native trees, provided eco-education to over 20,000 students and farmers, started a youth-led ‘Trees for Peace’ movement, and established the Eco-Pesa—a voucher system that promotes trade and creates new sources of income from ecologically and socially beneficial enterprises. They have also introduced sustainable practices like “green” charcoal made from agricultural waste (to replace trees cut for firewood), clean low-carbon cook stoves, rainwater catchment systems, and drip irrigation. Sustainable Village started supporting this organization by donating solar lanterns. We have recently connected Green World with Boulder-based herbal remedy company, WishGarden Herbs, with hopes that they will become their primary moringa supplier.
