Yerba Mansa Project
Grants Awarded
The Yerba Mansa Project is a community-supported initiative in the Middle Rio Grande Valley that bridges the connection between people, plants and the environment through volunteer-led restoration activities. This project emphasizes the importance of native edible and medicinal plants in New Mexico's biological and cultural heritage, and offers free educational programs and environmental service learning opportunities. The volunteers focus on restoring significant healing plants, encompassing adult and youth education about their importance, and safeguarding their habitats to retain this knowledge for current and future generations.
The Yerba Mansa Project seeks to enhance community connections with native edible and medicinal plants in the Middle Rio Grande Valley through volunteer-driven educational programs and environmental service learning. By restoring healing plants and imparting knowledge to youth and adults, the program aims to revitalize critical habitats and preserve cultural heritage for future generations.
The Yerba Mansa Project supports the ecologically and culturally important native edible and medicinal plants with threatened habitats through restorative action and educational events that build community. This endeavor began in late 2014 when the City of Albuquerque Open Space accepted our initial proposal to embark on field work on the public lands of the Rio Grande floodplain that we lovingly refer to as “the bosque”. It has grown into a multi-faceted endeavor which includes a community volunteer Bosque restoration project, education program offering free outdoor learning opportunities to local schools, and an ongoing data collection and mapping initiative. Since the project’s beginning, the Yerba Mansa Project has: 1. Established a collaborative multi-generational Bosque restoration project, in which the Albuquerque community has logged over 2,500 hours of volunteer service, helping to restore and revitalize native plant habitat in the bosque. 2. Brought over 620 students from 20 schools into the Bosque for quality, outdoor education programs free of cost and with most of those groups also receiving transportation grants through our organization. 3. Created a publicly available Plants of the Middle Rio Grande online field guide which includes over 150 entries written by local students.