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.
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 is a nonprofit and runs on volunteers. Nobody here takes a salary out of this course.