The Greening of the Hazel Henderson Center Grant Proposal
A Founding Investment in the Future of Support for a Green Economy
Hazel Henderson Center
10 Carrera Street, St. Augustine, FL 32084
Executive Summary
The Hazel Henderson Center seeks grants for The Greening of the Hazel Henderson Center — the sustainable transformation of the Center’s buildings and grounds, and at its heart, a Community Permaculture Garden that will serve as a living classroom for sustainable living, environmental stewardship, and food production.
The garden turns underutilized outdoor space at 10 Carrera Street into a productive, educational landscape designed around nature’s own systems. Rather than mimicking conventional ornamental landscaping, it is built on ecological principles that work with nature rather than against it, creating working relationships between plants, soil organisms, water cycles, and people.
Through workshops, demonstrations, and volunteer events, the garden gives community members of all ages hands-on opportunities to learn practical ways to grow food, conserve water, improve soil health, and make their own homes more sustainable. It is open to neighbors, students, families, and local organizations, and every technique demonstrated in it is one a visitor can carry home and repeat.
Grant funding supports site preparation and planting, rainwater harvesting and composting infrastructure, educational signage, workshop programming, and the ongoing stewardship that keeps the garden productive and open to the public. Full sponsorship of the garden is $[XX,XXX]. The Center welcomes full or partial funding, and gifts of any size are welcome and warmly encouraged.
Statement of Need
The challenges Hazel Henderson identified decades ago have become defining crises of the twenty-first century. Climate change, economic inequality, environmental degradation, technological disruption, and the erosion of institutional trust demand solutions that cross traditional disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. These interconnected problems require not only new policies and technologies, but visible, practical demonstrations that a different relationship with land, water, and food is possible at the scale of a single household.
Most environmental education reaches people as information rather than as practice. Households are told what to change without being shown how, and the distance between knowing and doing is where good intentions are lost. Sustainable landscaping, water conservation, composting, and home food production are learnable skills, but they are learned by doing them alongside someone who already has.
St. Augustine’s coastal setting makes those skills more than a hobbyist’s interest. Water is the region’s defining resource and its defining vulnerability, and the choices made across thousands of individual yards add up to a meaningful share of how a community uses it. Food travels a long way before it reaches most local tables. A demonstration garden addresses both at a scale a visitor can replicate in their own yard the same weekend.
The Hazel Henderson Center is uniquely positioned to fill this gap. Its physical setting, intellectual legacy, living library, and national network of sustainability and social innovation leaders create conditions that few institutions can replicate. The Greening of the Hazel Henderson Center turns the grounds themselves into a working argument for the ideas the Center exists to advance.
About the Hazel Henderson Center
The Hazel Henderson Center carries forward the legacy of Hazel Henderson (1933–2022) — ecological economist, futurist, syndicated columnist, author, and a founding voice of the global sustainability movement. For more than five decades, Henderson challenged conventional economic thinking and championed renewable energy, socially responsible investing, ethical markets, corporate accountability, and quality-of-life indicators that move beyond Gross Domestic Product.
The Center operates from Henderson’s former home in St. Augustine — a property that served for four decades as a gathering place for scholars, entrepreneurs, investors, educators, journalists, and systems thinkers exploring new approaches to economics, sustainability, governance, and social innovation. Following Henderson’s passing, trustees, advisors, collaborators, and community partners established the Center as a nonprofit institution committed to preserving and activating her intellectual legacy. Through leadership residencies, educational programming, research initiatives, strategic convenings, and community partnerships, the Center cultivates the ideas, relationships, and practical tools needed to address the defining challenges of this century.
The Center’s key assets include:
A living library of more than 5,600 books and 1,000+ journal issues
Archives preserved through academic partnerships, including the University of Missouri
Residency accommodations, a research library, collaborative gathering spaces, a workshop room, kitchen, outdoor areas, a pool, and parking
An experienced leadership team and Strategic Foresight Advisory Committee with deep expertise in sustainability, ethical finance, education, and community development
Close relationships with Ethical Markets Media and its globally recognized Research Advisory Board, connecting the Center to a broad international network of practitioners, investors, academics, and public-sector leaders
The Hazel Henderson Center is a Florida not-for-profit corporation and a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. EIN: 41-2894661.
The Place
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the United States, and the Center sits inside that living history. Its historic district is compact and fully walkable — cobblestone streets, Spanish colonial architecture, Flagler College’s gilded halls, and the Castillo de San Marcos, standing guard over the bay since 1672. Within a short walk of the Center: waterfront seafood restaurants, neighborhood wine bars, art galleries, and dining that draws on four hundred and fifty years of layered culinary history. The Atlantic beaches are fifteen minutes away.
This isn’t incidental to the program — it’s central to it. Hazel chose this home deliberately, and everyone who comes here experiences a version of what she built her life’s work around: a place where big thinking and genuine hospitality coexist. The garden extends that welcome outdoors, and makes the grounds themselves part of what the Center has to teach.
The Program
About the Garden
The Community Permaculture Garden is designed using ecological principles that work with nature rather than against it. Unlike conventional landscaping, permaculture systems mimic natural ecosystems, building deliberate relationships between plants, soil organisms, water cycles, and people so that each element supports the others and the whole requires less input over time.
Key features of the garden include:
Raised garden beds for food production
Native and pollinator-friendly plants
Rainwater harvesting and water conservation systems
Composting and soil-building demonstrations
Edible food forests and perennial plantings
Educational signage explaining sustainable practices
Community workshop and gathering spaces
The garden is open to community members, students, families, and local organizations interested in learning sustainable gardening techniques that can be replicated at home. It also connects directly to the Center’sexisting programming: interns work on garden initiatives as part of their placements, and the garden provides a natural setting for workshops, community dialogues, and public events already hosted at 10 Carrera Street.
Community Impact
Environmental Benefits
Reducing water consumption through regenerative design
Improving soil health and biodiversity
Supporting pollinators and native wildlife
Demonstrating climate-resilient landscaping practices
Reducing food transportation impacts through local food production
Educational Benefits
Offering free workshops on sustainable gardening
Teaching food-growing skills to families and students
Demonstrating practical environmental stewardship
Providing hands-on learning opportunities for all ages
Community Benefits
Creating a welcoming community gathering space
Encouraging volunteerism and civic engagement
Strengthening neighborhood connections
Increasing access to fresh, locally grown food
Connection to the Green Economy
This project reflects the principles of the green economy by demonstrating how environmental sustainability and economic prosperity work together rather than against each other.
The green economy promotes practices that improve human well-being while reducing environmental risks and conserving natural resources. By teaching residents how to grow food efficiently, reduce water usage, compost organic waste, and create productive landscapes, the Center helps community members lower household costs while reducing environmental impact. Participants gain skills that can reduce grocery expenses, conserve water, improve property value, and contribute to a more sustainable local economy.
Hazel Henderson championed the idea that healthy communities, healthy economies, and healthy ecosystems are interconnected — that economic success should be measured not only through financial growth, but through environmental stewardship and community well-being. She built her career on making that case in economic terms, and on insisting that ideas only count once they touch the ground. The garden is that argument at the scale of a single yard: a place where the value of healthy ecosystems, community knowledge, and careful resource management can be seen, learned, and taken home.
Organization
The Hazel Henderson Center is guided by an experienced leadership team with expertise in sustainability, education, nonprofit management, ethical finance, and community development:
Dr. Carol Spalding, Co-Trustee
Beth Binns, Managing Director and Co-Trustee
Dr. Paula Seymour, Director of Innovative Studies Programs
Mara Zepeda, Director of HH Legacy Initiatives
Jan McAlpine, Director of Development
Tommy Maletta, Editor, Ethical Markets
The Center also benefits from the guidance of its Strategic Foresight Advisory Committee, whose members include Leslie Danziger, Elsie Maio, Vicki Robin, former U.S. Representative Claudine Schneider, and Jean Gaddy Wilson. A broader network of advisors and collaborators contributes expertise across environmental stewardship, architecture, education, finance, governance, entrepreneurship, and systems change.
The Center’s close relationship with Ethical Markets Media and its internationally recognized Research Advisory Board gives participants access to a global network of practitioners, investors, academics, and public-sector leaders—significantly extending the professional development and collaborative opportunities available beyond what any single institution can offer.
Conclusion
The Hazel Henderson Center believes that sustainability begins at the community level. By creating a permaculture demonstration garden, the Center puts practical tools for environmental stewardship, food security, and sustainable living directly into the hands of the people who live around it.
Grant support from you will establish the garden, open it to the community, and build the foundation for a program of lasting environmental and educational impact. Together, we can build a vibrant community space that honors Hazel Henderson’s vision of a healthier, more sustainable future while demonstrating the power of the green economy in action. We are grateful for your consideration and invite you to reach out with any questions, to request additional detail on the project, or to schedule a conversation with Center leadership about how your support can make this work possible.
Funding Options
The cost of establishing and sustaining the Community Permaculture Garden is presented as a single, all-inclusive sum covering site preparation and planting, rainwater harvesting and composting infrastructure, educational signage, workshop programming, and ongoing stewardship:
Full Garden Sponsorship — $[XX,XXX] — establishes the Community Permaculture Garden in full and sustains it through its first full growing season
Named Garden Feature — $[X,XXX] — funds a single element of the garden, such as the rainwater harvesting system, the composting demonstration area, the pollinator plantings, or the educational signage
Workshop Series Sponsorship — $[X,XXX] — funds a season of free public workshops on sustainable gardening, composting, and regenerative landscape practices
The Center welcomes support structured in any of the following ways:
Full Project Sponsorship — A sole funder providing full support for the entire project budget
Feature Sponsorship — A single funder sponsoring one garden feature or the workshop series
Collective Funding — Co-funders contributing collectively toward a pooled fund supporting the garden as a whole
Funders providing full project sponsorship or feature sponsorship will be recognized as the named supporter of the garden or of the individual feature, including on the garden’s educational signage where appropriate. All contributors are acknowledged in program communications and in public dissemination of the project’s outcomes, in accordance with each funder’s recognition preferences.
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