Common Ground
We may come from different places and have different needs. But we all share common ground.
A harvest that helps create the next harvest.
Common Ground begins with a straightforward idea: grow more of what we can here, share what we grow with our community, and use part of each harvest to help make the next one possible.
Some of what we grow will be sold to local restaurants and through local markets and community booths. That revenue can help pay for seeds, growing supplies, water, maintenance and future harvests—and, when possible, help us expand what Common Ground can produce.
The harvest helps sustain the project.
The project helps sustain the community.
A substantial portion of what we grow is intended to return directly to the community. Fresh produce shared with neighbors is not an afterthought or whatever remains after sales. Sharing is part of the plan from the beginning.
Grow. Sell. Share. Reinvest. Grow again.
You do not need to be a farmer to participate.
Common Ground is a project where we welcome volunteers. Someone may plant seedlings, tend plants, harvest vegetables, prepare produce for distribution, help at a local booth, maintain equipment or simply spend a few useful hours working beside a neighbor they had not met before.
We do not want to divide the community into donors, volunteers and recipients. Someone who receives vegetables one month may volunteer in a greenhouse the next. Someone buying produce at a booth may help finance another planting. A restaurant buying locally grown food helps sustain the cycle too.
What matters is that the work continues and more of what we grow here finds its way back to people who live here.
The greenhouse should fit Ocean View—not the other way around.
Common Ground is being developed for the actual conditions of Ocean View. At roughly 3,000–3,500 feet elevation, our location can experience significant winds and conditions quite different from coastal Hawaiʻi.
We are still evaluating the right greenhouse architecture. Conventional engineered structures, domed greenhouses and other approaches each deserve consideration. We will choose based on durability, practicality, maintainability, growing performance and suitability for the site—not simply on which structure looks best in a rendering.
The greenhouse is the tool. Growing food, sustaining future harvests and sharing with the community is the purpose.
Something we can build together—and keep growing.
Common Ground is not simply about giving food away. It is about creating something together that can continue producing food tomorrow.
However you participate, you are helping put something back into the soil—and something back into the community.