The Community Garden.
The preservation and community-benefit institution behind this platform — and the reason it exists.
How this works
This site is a cultural business: courses, guides, art sales, journeys, and disclosed retreat referrals — designed to sustain itself rather than depend on donations. A fixed share of its net revenue funds The Community Garden's preservation work: language documentation, oral-history recording, transcription and translation, community media training, digital archives, equipment, and community copies of every recording.
The Community Garden does not claim ownership of Shipibo knowledge. It acts as producer and custodian while Shipibo contributors and communities keep authority over their language, stories, art, and recordings.
Who we are
The team Two people run The Community Garden.
Dakota Wint
The Community Garden began with a seven-year-old girl. Haviv, from Urubamba in the Peruvian Andes, needed surgery in Lima; the fundraiser Dakota ran for her brought in over $18,000 and covered the flights, the operations, and her family's housing and food through a long recovery. The foundation became official in 2022. Since then it has built Escuela Uno, an open-air art school in the Peruvian Amazon, raised $57,000 for a Turkish village after the 2023 earthquake, and run programs across four regions. Dakota has spent time along the Ucayali, and built this platform.
Peter Tran
Peter works on the part of this that never appears on a screen: the relationships in the communities themselves, the partnerships and funding that keep the programs paid for, and the photography, film and design that carry the work out into the world.
The Shipibo teachers recording this language are the other half of the team. Each one is named here with the community and the river they learned in, as their recordings arrive.
Language, art, and living culture — kept with the people who carry it.
What comes back
Reciprocity The language course is sold. We think it is fair to say plainly, before anything has been earned, what happens to the money — rather than deciding once there is some.
- The speakers who record it receive a copy of every recording they made, for themselves and their community; their name and photograph on the course, if they want them there; and the finished course free, for them and their families.
- A named share of every sale goes back to the Ucayali — to the communities the language comes from. We are setting the figure with the speakers rather than announcing it at them, and it will be published here once it is agreed.
- Anyone Shipibo learns free. If this is your language, you do not pay us to study it.
The Community Garden Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3), official since October 2022, and runs on volunteers. Nobody here takes a salary out of this course.