By Crissy Pascual

What is Daily Acts and how did it get started?

We are an educational nonprofit whose mission is to create more connected, equitable, climate-resilient communities by helping people reclaim the power of their daily actions through programs like installing gardens and gray water systems and doing lawn transformations. We've done a whole range of things. 

It’s the idea of changing the world in a garden. Being in a garden and seeing this transformative change and connecting to billions of years of nature’s wisdom. It all comes down to creating a nurturing community. There’s food, medicine, beauty, habitat, carbon sequestration, drought and flood mitigation — all what a garden can do.

About 30 years ago, I started to discover these incredible change makers. I happened to go to an herb conference and I landed at this place called the United Plant Savers Sanctuary in Ohio and it just kind of fully cracked open my heart and mind. It’s where I discovered a lot of the things that heavily influenced me and Daily Acts. I sat in on a permaculture talk by this guy named Mark Cohen and I didn’t really know what permaculture was but it made sense, all this ecological sustainability stuff. I met Mark, Paul Straus, and Kenny Ausebel from Bioneers all in the same weekend at the same conference. Then over the next decade, I did yearly trips to the Belize Agroforestry Research Center to study and spend time with Mark and others.

My mom passed away 25 years ago, right after 9/11. There was this silencing of dissent at the time, as if dissent was un-American. And there was so much loss and then my personal loss, it was the combo that propelled me to want to do something positive. At the core of Daily Acts is a positive proactive response. There’s always painful and difficult things that happen in life and our ability to choose our response is the core of our power. This idea of where your heart’s inspiration meets the hurt you’re called to heal. 

What are your most memorable “acts”?

It kind of blows me away the number of mobilizations and transformations and deeply inspiring gatherings, I can barely contain it to a top ten! Like transforming the Cavanagh Center into the region's first public food forest with 150 volunteers, then a few months later helping transform the Petaluma City Hall in a day, and then months later launching the 350 Garden Challenge, a goal we were even afraid to say. Then when the dust settled in one weekend, over 600 gardens were planted and revitalized.

And we used to do these big gatherings, Ripple the World, where you’d have 600 of the top change makers in the community filling the Santa Rosa Vets Hall. One year Congressman Jared Huffman and other great local artists were singing “Ripple on Still Water” as a 600-person singalong. 

What have you learned – any big surprises or mistakes?

There’s certainly painful leadership lessons. I don’t really regret any of it. The early days, starting from scratch and putting your heart and passion out there. And this call to action to bring in people and figure out what you’re doing was really exciting. Then, maturing and sustaining and being able to take care of your team and pay living wages and have a healthy culture. How do we make sure we’re all pointed and moving in the same direction together? 

There’s been a lot of amazing positive lessons and a lot of challenges, usually to do with fundraising and keeping the lights on. 

There’s not a lot of people in the same job for 25 years, so, refinding the inspiration again and again and sustaining for the long haul. It’s amazing and it’s difficult. It’s easy to burn out. It’s an ongoing challenge. People should have time with their families and out in nature and doing what they love. It would be easy to do it 24/7 but we want people to be able to be nurturing all the parts of their lives that make them whole so they can contribute their best. 

What are your personal daily “acts”? And what kind of daily acts can people start doing now?

I’ve got crazy amounts of practices and habits. There’s a little wooden stool right at the edge of the house behind some bushes that I sit on every day and I have tea with my journal and I do meditation and I do various mantras and go through my values and recenter and lean into, ‘What’s the difficult stuff I’m dealing with? What am I inspired by?’ 

I exercise a lot, working out and running. I try and do things I’m passionate about. That’s been a major focus of mine for 15 years – honing my compass for who I’m trying to be in the world, my vision, my values and the habits and practices and tools and systems that help me continually recenter on that. I have quotes all over the wall. 

There's so many things people could do in their lives to reclaim their power and agency a little bit, and make choices that are aligned with their values. What can you contribute to, in your life, in your neighborhood, in your garden, at your school, at your work? What news are you reading? Are you voting? So, putting more time and attention into finding and being true to what you're inspired to contribute. For us, a lot of that's in the garden. 

We're now in the fall. Plant garlic, plant kale, put in a rainwater catchment, clear your gutters. Come out and volunteer in the next three weeks. We're going to be putting like 1,800 plants in the ground at Casa Grande High School and Santa Rosa Junior College. 

What is something that most people don’t know about you?

What brought me to finding my purpose was following my passion and snowboarding was my first and truest passion – flying through the trees and jumps on a powder day, riding down new trails, scrambling up some High Sierra Pass with a friend just to peek over the other side, like all that being out in the living, breathing world, just relishing this incredible planet and our people, that’s the stuff that gets me super juiced. In the early days, I used to do X Games sort of things and I was sponsored. 

I studied business and marketing and went and worked in the corporate world and I ejected from that and snowboarded full time and traveled and competed. 

I still launch. I’ll still ride double black diamonds and jump off cliffs and stuff. Snowboarding, hiking, backpacking, camping, mountain biking with family and friends, just being out in nature, and enjoying this precious, beautiful planet – I want to be doing all that stuff till I'm 80.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Crissy Pascual is a photojournalist and co-founder of Petaluma Voice. She can be reached at photos@petalumavoice.org.