Summer 2026 at The Common|Wealth: A Season of Abundance and Connection

Summer 2026 at Sweet Water Foundation was defined by abundance, a deliberate centering of local intergenerational engagement, and the cultivation of community wellness through food, art, and shared experience/labor. The season built directly upon the momentum launched during the May 13 “We the Publics…” Civic Arts Talk, yielding fifteen weeks of activating The Common|Wealth as a sanctuary where theoretical ideas of community refuge were translated into daily, hands-on spatial practice, shared farm-to-table meals, and intergenerational creation.

Read on to explore highlights from Summer 2026 at The Common|Wealth.

Welcoming New Partners and Old

This summer, we deepened new and long-standing relationships. SWF welcomed returning international friends, including a third cohort of students from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Global Experience Program, alongside local youth cohorts like Austin Grown and visiting growers from Michigan State University’s Organic Farmer Training Program. Both groups immersed themselves in the campus rhythm, participating in Wellness Wednesday hands-on work of the land and civic arts workshops.

A central highlight of the season was the blossoming collaboration with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO). Catalyzed when Omo Moses brought KOCO Executive Director Shannon Bennett to campus on May 14, the relationship quickly matured into a weekly ritual. Staff, youth, elders, and community members from KOCO joined SWF every Wednesday and most Fridays—putting their hands in the soil alongside the Neighborhood Academy and sharing farm meals. Demonstrating true reciprocal partnership, the SWF team also visited KOCO’s emerging neighborhood garden site in Kenwood-Oakland to offer solidarity, share resources, and begin planning for collective activation and cross-neighborhood exchange in 2027.

Summer 2026 Civic Arts Workshop Series

At the heart of the summer was the 11-week Civic Arts Workshop Series, curated and led by Summer 2026 Civic Artist-in-Residence Juarez Hawkins. From nature-print leaf portraits and mulberry tie-dyeing to air-dry clay vessels and gelli plate monoprinting, the series engaged over 250 participant-visits inside the sanctuary of the Civic Arts Church.

Read the full Summer 2026 Civic Arts Workshop Series recap post here.

Cultivating Weekly Rituals: Wellness Wednesdays & Friday Markets

From late May through Labor Day weekend, SWF hosted fifteen Wellness Wednesdays, welcoming over 200 unique attendees alongside dozens of core community regulars. Sweet Water Foundation’s Wellness Wednesday ritual is an active reclamation of community wellness and community wealth. Today, the word "community" is routinely flattened into passive audience engagement, while "wellness" is reduced to transactional self-care and luxury retreats. To dismantle this perversion, SWF returns to the Latin root of community—communis (co- "together" + munis "function, task, duty")—grounding wellness in shared social obligation, mutual care, and physical labor. It is a visceral re-membering of ancestral traditions: shucking beans on porches, tilling soil, moving wood chips, making art, and breaking bread together on a level playing field where societal titles carry no weight.

Concurrently, the weekly Friday Neighborhood Markets transformed the campus edges into a vibrant open-air market and creative studio. Neighbors gathered to shop for fresh seasonal produce at SWF’s pay-what-you-can market stand, share farm recipes, engage with drop-in civic arts tables led by youth, and enjoy live acoustic music performances led by SWF Human-in-Residence Charles Pryor and visiting musicians.

The Neighborhood Academy: Intergenerational Anchors

The Neighborhood Academy (NA) served as the vital, intergenerational backbone of the summer season. Bringing together a diverse cross-section of South Side residents—barbers, musicians, artists, retirees, caretakers, PhD students, recent high school graduates, community organizers, and educators—NA members showed up every week across Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to support land cultivation and site maintenance.

This summer’s cohort was anchored by returning long-standing members Alesia, “Big,” Jessica, Phoenix, and returning SWF Fellow and now PhD candidate, Naomi. Serving as neighborhood docents, NA members welcomed new visitors, mentored youth, and facilitated civic arts tables. By taking ownership of daily operations and cross-city exchanges, the Neighborhood Academy expanded the depth of Regenerative Neighborhood Development (RND) and demonstrated the power of building community wealth from within.

Flowers and Herbs Galore: Exploring Herbal Teas

Throughout summer, SWF continued its focus on harnessing nature’s medicinal and nutritional gifts beyond food through herbal tea making. Cultivated from seed with care throughout spring and early summer, the farm flourished with a vibrant array of flowers, herbs, and native plants designed to yield beautiful summer bouquets and essential ingredients for medicinal herbal teas to nourish the community year-round. Harvests included annual flowers (cosmos, marigolds, calendula, zinnias, cornflowers), fragrant culinary and medicinal herbs (lemon balm, mint, lavender, oregano, basil, Cuban oregano), and native perennials (bee balm, echinacea, yarrow).

We harvested these botanicals from summer through fall. Freshly picked blooms brightened communal spaces, while harvested leaves and petals were carefully dried and blended into custom, farm-fresh herbal teas. Enjoyed together during Wellness Wednesday meals and packaged for the community, these tea blends embody SWF's commitment to seasonal wellness—storing the warmth and vitality of summer to sustain and nourish the neighborhood through the cold winter and spring months ahead.

Building for Abundance: The New Shed

Adding to the evolving timber infrastructure of The Common|Wealth, the team designed and built a new, custom timber-frame shed on campus this summer. Designed by SWF Executive Director Emmanuel Pratt and built by the SWF core team—including Rudy Taylor, Jr.—the new structure expands the campus's capacity for tool storage, material processing, and seasonal harvesting operations, ensuring the land's physical infrastructure continues to grow alongside the community.