This is the website of the International Community of Practice – Farming for Health. We are an international group of researchers and practitioners in the field of Green Care, Health Farms and other initiatives concerning special care in green environments.

What we do

We are working, researching and meeting yearly to enhance to scientific and practical knowledge of Care Farming in general and special themes in particular. The interdisciplinary approach works and teaches us to be specific about our research (outcomes) and using the knowledge from practice. We also inspire each other to keep working in our own countries and make others as enthusiastic as we are.

More about farming for health (also called green care, care farming or social farming) >>

International CoP Conference

Since 2004 we started to meet in workshops and inspiring meetings. The first two years we organized our meetings in The Netherlands since the initiative was started by Stichting Omslag, Steunpunt Landbouw & Zorg and the Wageningen University. In 2006 we got together in Stavanger, Norway. In 2007,  we had a meeting in Ghent, Belgium. Our latest meeting was in Pisa, Italy in 2009. Our meeting for 2011 in the United Kingdom was cancelled, unfortunately, but we hope to be organizing a conference in spring 2012.

Farming for Health online

In the meantime we try to stay in contact with each other via our mailing list, but also various social media are used, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and individual weblogs.

• Here’s our LinkedIn group, feel free to join;
• In Flickr everyone can upload pictures. If you tag them with ‘farmingfohealth’ everyone can find them here.
• We have a Facebook group, but with the lauch and popularity of Facebook pages, we just create a Facebook page here. Please start following the page by clicking the “Like” button. Feel free to post and comment.
• We have a Twitter account we use to send updates now and then and to link community members on Twitter. Follow us @farmingfrhealth.

If you want to stay updated, please join this Community of Practice and feel welcome to link up with us online. See some options in the menu How to connect, in the top right sidebare on this website.

Membership

The Community is already joined by members from over 22 European countries, as well as members from North America, Asia and Africa. We hope to grow further, but also stronger in the coming years. If you want to join this community, please contact us. (Temporarily via dorineruter@gmail.com. After we indicated our community was ‘born’ in 2004, Google thinks we are underaged and blocks our gmail address… Hope to get it back soon!).

Photograph by: Massimo Vollaro

Updates

Latest items (blog / news) are on the home page of this website. Subscribe to this website (top right ont the page) to receive an alert when new items are posted here. (Your address will not be used for any commercial purposes.)

Photograph by: Massimo Vollaro