San Miguel de Allende, Mexico is a small city with a big heart. More than 100 charitable organizations support San Miguel’s local community, most with a focus on food, education or health. One of the most innovative is protecting and restoring the local environment in ways that support rural Mexican communities.

Twelve years ago, Ben Zion Ptashnik and Victoria Collier began to create an oasis of green just outside the city in the pueblo of San Jose de Gracia. The result, Tikkun Eco Center, is a model of “permaculture,” a system of farming and building that emphasizes harmony with the local environment. The off-grid Center has community gardens, thousands of new trees and cactus, plow horses, bee hives, solar panels and a wind generator, worm composting, and ponds of fish. Victoria describes how she struggled with grasshoppers in her organic garden for years and finally resolved the problem with a large flock of chickens that follow her through the yard as she knocks the bugs off of corn, kale and tomato plants.

The farm isn’t just a model. It’s an integral part of the local community 10 miles outside of San Miguel. When their neighbors lost their jobs during the pandemic, Victoria and Ben provided the farm’s abundance to 60 struggling families. They’re also working with local residents to help them grow their own home gardens. Perhaps most importantly, Ben and Victoria are restoring the traditional village rainwater reservoir system to provide desperately needed water to their local community and family farms.

After the arrival of deep electric wells in Mexico more than 50 years ago, rainwater reservoirs fell into disrepair. Now that those wells are going dry due to over-exploitation by agribusiness, campesino communities are suffering from critical lack of water during the long dry months. This is a growing crisis that threatens the water and food security of the entire San Miguel region, and many more across Mexico.

In May, 2022 Ben and Victoria restored the San Jose de Gracia reservoir, removing 1450 truckloads of soil that had filled in over decades, and rebuilding the broken dam. A few months later, rainwater began filling the small lake once again. Wildlife and local herds of horses, cattle and goats began to return. Victoria and Ben stocked the lake with tilapia and are now installing a solar pump to bring the water up to the village. The reservoir inspired the local Department of Ecology to help create an eco park and community center, donating 1000 trees to reforest the zone around the reservoir, stabilizing the soils. With the success of this first project, they’ve got plans to restore 20 more vital reservoirs in San Miguel’s rural communities, working with another wonderful local water security organization, Caminos de Agua. The Ecology Department has agreed to donate 50,000 more trees to this project.

Community service and environmental protection aren’t new to Ben and Victoria. Before moving to San Miguel, Ben was a legislator and environmental activist in Vermont. Victoria lead community agriculture programs in the United States and has published articles describing threats to democracy, which inevitably impact environmental protections. Together, Victoria and Ben founded the National Election Defense Coalition, which advocates for election integrity in the United States.

You can support the work of Tikkun Eco Center with donations, and by volunteering for their projects. Consider attending a weekend tree-planting party or pond dig-out. And when you’re there, be sure to visit the chickens. https://www.tikkunsanmiguel.mx/