Cool It Burque Events

Hello friends of Cool It Burque,

Kayla Frost and I, Sandra Mack, would like to share some of our thoughts with you as we kick off the 2026 season, as growers of Cool It Burque. We hope that you've had good wintering, as we have, with the opportunity for reflection and renewal that a quieter, darker time can bring.

From the very beginning of Cool It Burque, we have been interested in how we can develop not just native and climate-adapted, cooling, and food-bearing forests for the benefit of our community, but also how we can develop the culture and community that grows these forests. How do we connect with, care for, and understand our ecosystem? We have wondered how we can meet and collaborate with each other in ways that grow our capacity for taking care of each other and of our non-human relatives through these tough times.

We also felt from the start that Cool It Burque belonged in the gift economy: the natural, reciprocal, complex relationship economy, rather than in the capitalist economy. The most practical result of this is that we have chosen to focus on what people can do with their hands, directly, by sharing knowledge and skills with each other, and by learning about and growing with plants, fungi, and our web of relations. We have also not incorporated, developed formal structure, written grants, or asked people for money, and we never will. Cool It Burque is, in fact, not a thing but a process, one that we sincerely invite you to make yourself at home in, and co-create.

One of the results of our work in the first few years is that we found a place at Rio Grande Community Farm – a half acre between fields – where we are invited to develop a dryland food forest. Everyone at Rio Grande Community Farm is very supportive, and our collaboration is growing in new ways. There is now the possibility of a much larger food forest over time, with broader collaboration with many groups. We love it: less control, more food forests!

This community food forest, where we can learn and share a new way of supporting ourselves by restoring our local ecosystem, needs a diversity of people as much as it needs a diversity of native and climate-adapted plants. And so this March 8, we invite you to attend the first of what we hope will be many gatherings where we can spend time together outdoors in this baby forest. We can get to know each other and collaborate to grow ourselves a Cool It Burque culture and a thriving food ecosystem. We also want to acknowledge indigenous knowledge and culture, the indigenous lands we live on, and to invite indigenous people to join us. We invite you to help us make space for everyone, and we want to hear from you – what are you excited about, working on, wondering about? What do you want to bring to or need from this new food forest, literally and culturally?

I (Sandra) am a public school science teacher, and in many ways I am trying to break out of the constraints of our current institutions and participate in a more organic and collaborative way of learning. Kayla is someone who is deeply interested in growing our connections with and care for each other and our non-human relations, and shifting the dominant culture to one that once again sees the earth as alive, intelligent, and sacred. What about you? We will have a circle where we can speak and listen to each other, and also want everyone to have time to check out the site, do some planting (a plant you bring or one of ours), and some snacking (optional to bring a utensil-free potluck item. We will have water but bring a water bottle).

Thank you all and we look forward to co-creating this next season of Cool It Burque!

1701 Montaño Rd NW, Albuquerque, NM 87107

Park at the Los Poblanos Fields Open Space parking lot and walk behind the red barn to our food forest site (links go to Google Maps locations).

Check out our Past Events here