Asset-based community development
Start with what your neighborhood already has.
A yard that can grow food. A neighbor who knows how. A question people can answer together. Pantree helps a watershed see those assets, connect them, and put them to work.
A neighborhood should be able to feed its people, organize its work, and teach what it knows.
Centralization pulled all three away from daily life, then sold them back to us as services. Pantree is trying to return them as tools people can use this weekend. Each is useful on its own. Together, they compound local value.
The Garden
Plan the space you have
Land can store power.
Tell Pantree about your sun, soil, water, time, budget, and goals. It returns a phased draft you can inspect, change, and carry out yourself or with local help.
Start with one container, one bed, or a whole yard. You decide the pace.
See howPulse
Put one local question to the group
Coordination can direct power.
People respond to short statements with agree, disagree, or pass and can add statements of their own. A Pulse can cover one watershed or a nearby area.
The result shows common ground and real disagreement without turning everything into one long comment thread.
See howEducation Hubs
Learn or teach nearby
Knowledge can carry power forward.
Create a free or paid workshop, an ongoing group, or a peer circle for up to seven people. Participants can keep a simple record of what they practiced.
Useful knowledge can come from a neighbor, a practitioner, or someone learning alongside you.
See howHere, power is practical: food in the ground, a question a group can answer, a skill another person can carry forward. It can be shared, stored, and used well or badly. Pantree is built to help people see what they have and decide for themselves what to do with it.
01Land · The Garden
Make a garden plan you can use.
Pantree starts with the conditions of your space, then breaks the work into phases you can review and change. This approach comes from .
Start with a container, one bed, or a whole yard. The pace is yours.
Make a garden plan you can use.
Pantree starts with the conditions of your space, then breaks the work into phases you can review and change. This approach comes from .
Start with a container, one bed, or a whole yard. The pace is yours.
Planning your own yard transition? Read the practical lawn-to-garden guide.
02Coordination · Pulse
Before a neighborhood can act together, it has to know where it stands.
Most online discussion rewards the argument. A Pulse is built to make the shape of a local question easier to see. People respond to one statement at a time, so shared ground and real disagreement are not buried in a thread.
Use it for practical choices: a tool library, a workshop time, a street planting day, or anything else a local group needs to think through.
Ask the watershed a question
For example: “Should we ask the HOA to allow front-yard food gardens?” Choose the watershed or nearby area you want to hear from, then add a few starting statements.
Agree, disagree, or pass
People react to one short statement at a time. They can also add a statement of their own, and the creator can decide whether new statements need review before they appear.
See the range of answers
Statements with broad support rise. Statements that divide the group stay visible too. Every Pulse is non-binding; it is information for the people involved, not a decision made for them.
A Pulse does not make the decision for anyone. It gives the people involved a clearer place to begin.
03Knowledge · Education Hubs
Make local knowledge easier to find.
Useful teachers are often nearby but hard to find. Someone may know how to graft a fruit tree, test soil, repair irrigation, cook a harvest, facilitate a hard conversation, or organize a reading group.
Education Hubs give that knowledge a place to meet. Create a one-time workshop, an ongoing group, or a peer circle for up to seven people. A facilitator can offer it free or set a price.
Participants can keep a simple record of the skills they practiced. Adults can also keep parent-managed records of what their family learns together.
A note from the founder
Hi, I'm Alborz.
Founder, Pantree
I've spent a lot of my life studying why people change. Not why they should. Why they actually do. That question took me through epidemiology at UC Berkeley, behavioral science at Johns Hopkins, HIV/AIDS prevention work in Lesotho, farmer's markets in Baltimore, and most recently, urban health research in Singapore. And eventually, into permaculture. Learned the hard way, in real yards, with practitioners who let me fail alongside them.
Somewhere in all that, I realized something uncomfortable: the same science that helps people can just as easily be used to trap them. I've watched the frameworks I studied get turned into attention machines. Apps, food systems, entire patterns of being. All designed to maximize engagement, erode autonomy, and leave people less capable of organizing their own lives.
I kept meeting people who knew exactly what to do but couldn't start. There are a thousand YouTube videos on sheet mulching. They're not stuck because of information. They're stuck because they're alone. No neighbor who knows what actually thrives here. No one to swap cuttings with. No one to call when things go wrong. And meanwhile, kids growing up without ever touching soil, without the kind of ecological knowledge that used to be ordinary.
That's what Pantree is. The coordination layer that's been missing. Local knowledge, neighbors, tools, labor. Organized by watershed, not zip code.
If any of that resonates, I'd love to have you join the network.
There are more skilled ways to protest; I am building one way, in the spirit that it inspires you to find your own.
— Alborz
