Our Mission
The Porch Swing Collective exists to help people build more connected, intentional, and resilient lives through practical education, shared knowledge, and community.
We create opportunities for people to learn useful skills, understand the systems that shape our everyday lives, and strengthen their connections to food, nature, place, and one another. We believe knowledge is most powerful when it is accessible, shared generously, and put into practice—and that learning together can help build stronger people, stronger communities, and a healthier relationship with the world we all share.
Our mission is not simply to teach people how to do things. It is to create the knowledge, confidence, connections, and opportunities that help people participate more fully in their own lives and communities.
What We Believe
Knowledge Should Be Shared
Useful knowledge shouldn’t be guarded or treated as something reserved for experts. We believe in making learning approachable, practical, and accessible—and in creating spaces where people can share what they know and learn from one another.
Connection Matters
We are connected to our food, our communities, the natural world, and one another whether we recognize those connections or not. Understanding and strengthening them helps us make more thoughtful choices, build stronger communities, and live with greater intention.
Practical Skills Build Confidence and Resilience
There is something powerful about knowing how to do things for ourselves. Growing food, preserving a harvest, understanding our environment, cooking, making, repairing, preparing, and caring for the places where we live can make us more capable—but these skills become even more powerful when they help us care for and support one another.
Everyone Has Something to Contribute
Learning isn’t a one-way exchange between an expert and everyone else in the room. People bring their own experiences, cultures, traditions, questions, skills, and perspectives with them. We believe those differences make learning richer and communities stronger.
People and Nature Are Part of the Same System
Human life doesn’t exist separately from the natural world. Our food, water, health, communities, and economies are intertwined with the ecosystems around us. Understanding those relationships helps us care for the places we live while building lives that can thrive within them.
Small Actions Can Become Something Bigger
A garden bed, a jar of preserved food, a new skill, a shared meal, or a conversation with a neighbor may seem small on its own. But individual actions can ripple outward—building confidence, reducing waste, sharing resources, strengthening relationships, and creating change within families and communities.
There Is More Than One Way to Live Well
We aren’t interested in prescribing one perfect version of a sustainable, intentional, or connected life. People have different resources, abilities, cultures, homes, families, priorities, and circumstances. Our role is to offer knowledge, tools, and opportunities people can adapt to their own lives.
How We Put It Into Practice
Our values matter most when they shape what we actually do. The Porch Swing Collective is being built intentionally—from the way we teach and share information to the way we participate in our communities.
We Make Learning Useful and Accessible
We create education that people can actually use in their everyday lives. Through live workshops, digital courses, practical resources, reference materials, and free educational content, we offer different ways to learn so people can engage in ways that work for them.
Whenever possible, we explain not only how to do something, but why it works. Understanding gives people the confidence to adapt what they learn instead of simply following instructions.
We Create Opportunities for Connection
Learning is better when it brings people together. Our workshops and community activities are designed to encourage conversation, questions, shared experiences, and relationships—not simply the transfer of information.
As The Porch Swing Collective grows, we aim to create even more opportunities for people to gather, collaborate, exchange knowledge, and build meaningful connections within their communities.
We Learn From More Than One Kind of Expert
No single person or perspective holds all the knowledge worth sharing.
We seek opportunities to learn from educators, growers, makers, scientists, community members, traditional knowledge holders, local experts, and people whose lived experiences offer perspectives different from our own.
When knowledge isn’t ours to teach, we would rather make room for someone who can teach it well.
We Connect Skills to the Bigger Picture
A skill rarely exists in isolation.
Gardening connects to soil, water, wildlife, climate, food access, and local ecosystems. Food preservation connects to seasonality, food waste, culture, household resilience, and local food systems.
Our education explores those connections so people can understand not just the task in front of them, but how it fits into the larger systems we all participate in.
We Put Community Into the Work
Community isn’t simply something we talk about. As we grow, we want Porch Swing to create tangible opportunities to support and strengthen the places where we live.
That may take different forms over time—community partnerships, shared projects, mutual support, educational opportunities, resource sharing, or responding to needs that arise locally.
We want the business to remain flexible enough to ask, “What would be useful here?” and then find ways to contribute.
We Keep Learning, Too
We don’t believe good education requires pretending to know everything.
Knowledge changes. Science evolves. Communities teach us. People bring perspectives we haven’t considered. Sometimes we learn that there is a better way.
We are committed to staying curious, continuing our own education, listening when we get something wrong, and allowing what we learn to make our work better.
A Business Built For More Than Profit
The Porch Swing Collective is a for-profit social enterprise. That means we are building a financially sustainable business—but profit is not the only measure of success.
We believe a business can earn money, provide meaningful work, and grow while also making decisions that benefit people, communities, and the environment. Those goals don’t have to compete with one another.
We use a triple bottom line—people, planet, and prosperity—to help guide the way we grow.
People means considering the well-being of the people we teach, work with, learn from, and share community with. It means creating welcoming and accessible learning opportunities, paying people fairly for their knowledge and work, building meaningful partnerships, and looking for ways the resources of the business can strengthen the communities around us.
Planet means recognizing that our choices have environmental consequences. We aim to reduce unnecessary waste, use resources thoughtfully, support regenerative and sustainable practices, and consider environmental impact when making decisions about how we teach, create, purchase, package, and operate.
Prosperity means building a business that is financially healthy enough to last. Revenue allows us to pay educators and collaborators, create high-quality educational resources, invest in new programs, support community initiatives, provide jobs as we grow, and continue doing this work for years to come.
For us, success isn’t simply about how much The Porch Swing Collective grows. It’s about what that growth makes possible.
Our Commitment To Belonging
The Porch Swing Collective is built on the belief that learning and community are richer when more people are able to participate.
We welcome people of different backgrounds, identities, cultures, abilities, experiences, resources, and ways of living. We are committed to creating spaces where people are treated with dignity and respect, where curiosity is encouraged, and where differences are opportunities to learn from one another rather than barriers to belonging.
We also know that creating a welcoming community takes more than saying everyone is welcome. It requires listening, learning, paying attention to who is being included and who may be left out, and being willing to make changes when we can do better.
We won’t always get everything right. But we will keep listening, keep learning, and keep working to make The Porch Swing Collective a place where people can show up as themselves, share what they know, learn what they don’t, and know that their presence matters.