Rendezvous 2000

IN LATE July, the Guild will join Gould Farm in rural, southwestern Massachusetts to build a big barn. Founded in 1913 by social reform pioneer William J. Gould, Gould Farm is the oldest therapeutic community in the nation for adults with mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and severe depression.

Layout and cutting will start Monday, July 17 (arrival the previous evening), and culminate in the raising on July 28-29. The raising will be the centerpiece of the I Love Monterey (Mass.) Days, with folk music, craft exhibitions, and barbecue picnics. Numerous groups and individuals have come forward to co-sponsor, and a documentary may well come out of the event.

Gould Farm is located on 600 acres in a beautiful rural valley in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. A sauna and a great swimming hole are just a short walk from the work-site. The area is rife with summer cultural activities, including Tanglewood and the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. We hope to take off at least Sunday afternoon, July 23, to relax.

The new barn will significantly improve Gould Farm's Harvest and Trades Center, their work-training facilities for adults with psychiatric illnesses. It will house a full-scale food processing operation: a licensed commercial kitchen, a root cellar, a classroom, and a marketing office for Gould Farm Products. The barn will also increase Gould Farm's effectiveness as a community trying to feed itself: over 100 staff and guests maintain the operation on a continuous basis.

Gould Farm has been in operation for nearly a century. Its homestead program with working farm is the oldest of its kind in the nation, a prototype for community-based psychiatric rehabilitation.

The Massachusetts Portable Sawmill Association is a newly formed group led by Jim and Carla Clarke. They promote the good work of portable sawmill eowners by way of community service projects. Jim and his colleagues emphasize ecological practices and promote the sustainable use of woodlands. Oh, and they, too, like to have fun.

Please contact me directly if you want to come to Gould Farm. I'll send you a map and further details. We look forward to seeing you for this inspiring event; it will generate much interest in our craft here in the backyard of the Guild's Massachusetts office. Write me at PO Box 60, Becket, MA 01223, call me at 413-623- 9926, or email me at will@tfguild.org. -Will Beemer

We are a community of 120 people-guests, volunteers, staff, and staff families -- working together to sustain a dairy farm on 600 acres in the Berkshires. Visiting volunteers (like the Guild) bolster our energy, allowing us to accomplish what we cannot do alone. In turn they gain a more thoughtful perspective on mental illness as a community responsibility, not an individual's plight.

Gould Farm is built on the belief that work is healing. We grow and prepare much of our own food, chop firewood, maintain a dairy; take care of our children, and celebrate life's milestones. We work hard to overcome personality conflicts, competing values, generation gaps. And we refuse to accept disabilities as defining characteristics of people. The new barn will provide a functional space in which we will refine our social recipe for success in the workplace as a group, despite mental or emotional limitations of individuals.

Led by the efforts of the Guild, we will raise a 56-by-36-foot timber-framed barn this summer that will house a full-scale food processing operation. It will include a licensed commercial kitchen, a root cellar, a classroom, and a marketing office for Gould Farm Products like maple syrup, mint tea, dressings, and cheeses. A new greenhouse, auto repair shop, and woodworking shop will follow, creating practical work spaces that will sustain our farm for years to come. The barn will stand as a showcase to convey our mission: to provide people with mental illnesses daily opportunities to build more meaningful lives for themselves as members of a community, not in isolation.

The new barn will also increase Gould Farm's effectiveness as a community trying to feed itself. Our current makeshift work spaces often fall short of our capacity to grow gorgeous vegetables and herbs in large quantities. Lori, a guest of the Farm, tells the story best: "I had never worked with the earth before. I never thought about where vegetables come from, or where food comes from, until I came here. It's organic. It's good therapy, getting down in the dirt, seeing things grow," she says.

"There was a great deal of pride in the work we accomplished in the garden last summer. But being able to use all the vegetables would be a lot more rewarding. Things just go to waste because we don't have the right places to store stuff. It can get discouraging, especially when you think about how much more self-sufficient we could be." Recalling when an entire day's worth of tomato puree couldn't be frozen for lack of freezer space, Lori notes: "It shouldn't be a lot of work for nothing."

As any accomplished builder knows, achieving balance between economic viability and respect for individuality is a critical process. At Gould Farm, we achieve balance when all members are engaged and the end product is useful, marketable, or both. The new barn will represent the symbiotic relationship between sustainability of health and sustainability of enterprise. By processing, preserving, and storing our produce more effectively we will better use our natural resources. The sale of surplus as Gould Farm Products firmly establishes our presence in the larger community. Mission accomplished, and the bills get paid.

We're looking forward to this event, and enthusiasm is mounting. We envision a campground in our softball field and barbecue picnics near the dairy pasture. A group of sawmill owners from New England has agreed to join in, milling the timbers before Guildspeople join and raise them, a kind of sheep-to-shawl effort. We also envision significant public attendance, neighbors curious to know what a Guild of timber framers and an eclectic group like Gould Farm can accomplish together in one weekend.

"A lot of people come to the Farm to visit or volunteer, and so many of them are naive about mental illness," explains Lori. "But that's okay. Because here it's easy to throw yourself into the work, not concentrate on people's differences or issues, but work for a common cause -- to feed this community, literally and figuratively." -- Kim Hines, Director of Public Relations at Gould Farm.