Welcome to Diaspora Gardens
Diaspora Gardens is a Land+Art+Spirit practice rooted in regenerative relationships with land, community, and heritage. Through farming, arts, and spiritual connection, we repair, celebrate, and grow a future of justice and abundance. This work repairs relationships with the land, heals wounds of inequity, and strengthens bonds of community and ancestry.
Current Happenings
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Garden of the Soul
Registration is now open for 2026 Retreat Days. Say yes to healing, community, growth, and abundance.
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Seed Starter Campaign
Companions in Community
Rooting marginalized future growers of food and strong just communities
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Seeds of Repair
Community Supported Hope
Shares of online creativity & connection inspired by the Growing Season
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Team Openings
Come grow with us
Seasonal and part-time openings on our Black-led and Land+Art+Spirit micro-farm
About Us
We are a Land+Art+Spirit practice rooted in regenerative relationships with land, community, and cultural heritage. This practice restores what has been broken, celebrates what has been reclaimed, and grows a future rooted in justice, connection, and abundance.
Through regenerative farming, land-based arts, mentorship, and spiritual connection, we cultivate nourishment for the body, soul, and soil. Our work is guided by a deep commitment to repair: repairing relationships with the land, repairing the wounds of historical and systemic inequities, and repairing the bonds of community and ancestry through shared wisdom and care. Diaspora Gardens is a space of healing, creativity, and kinship; it is a movement to honor the past, tend the present, and foundation a thriving future.
At the heart of Diaspora Gardens is a micro-farm that grows food and medicines in harmony with the earth. This practice extends beyond the soil, seeding a reciprocal economy of respect, rest, and justice. We are devoted to fostering a thriving future by mentoring and employing future growers and community shapers from marginalized communities, ensuring that the roots of resilience run deep.
Nourishing the planet, bodies, spirits & communities by:
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Regenerating
Land, Bodies, & Hope
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Mentoring
Our rising Growers & Leaders
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Honoring & Celebrating
Gifts & Cultures of Marginalized Peoples
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Integrating
Arts, Culture, & Spirit
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Partnering
For Healing Within & Across Cultures
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Sharing
Food, Resources, & Joy
Meet Regina
Regina M. Laroche is a farmer, artist, educator, environmentalist, and spiritual director whose work is deeply rooted in her multi-cultural heritage: her mother’s rural South Carolina upbringing, her father’s Haitian Afro-Caribbean traditions, and her own life of travel and connection. Her projects cultivate healing, connection, and justice, honoring the past while growing a thriving future.
Regina’s Land+Art+Spirit practice is rooted in regenerative relationships with land, community, and cultural heritage. Through farming, arts, and spiritual connection, she grows food, medicine, and relationships. By mentoring BIPOC and other marginalized growers and honoring ancestral wisdom, Regina repairs, celebrates, and builds a future of justice, resilience, and abundance.
Inspired by InterPlay, Afro-Caribbean dance, and her farming life on the edge of Lake Superior, Regina’s performances, retreats, workshops, and gatherings seed kinship with the land and one another. For over thirty years, she has shared her practice with schools, churches, universities, intergenerational groups, communities across the globe, and visitors to her home farm on Madeline Island in Lake Superior.
In addition, Regina has been cultivated in the soil of family. She is married to Jeff Theune.
As an educator and a carpenter his creativity and skill have built the physical infrastructure for, and supported the skill sharing programs of, Diaspora Gardens.
Together they brought two amazing children into the world and into adulthood.
The Land
The lands of Diaspora Gardens on Mooninwanekaanig own the farmer, who - in turn - learns from the land the gifts of regenerative and reciprocal relationships and so much more. From these, we cultivate foods and medicines, health community, art, connection, and a spirituality of hope, active prayer, healing justice, and sharing.
The Gardens
In an effort to respond with hope-filled action to trends which diminish the earth, community, and spirit; Diaspora Gardens is a model of sustainable earth kinship, creativity, empowerment, and small-scale food production.
Diaspora Gardens is dedicated to growing life-giving connections as well as life-giving food. Connection with communities at the margins of the food system is a priority.
The Arts
Cultures that live rooted in the land and its rhythms made art as an expression of the land through them, and as an expression to the land. It was core to the reciprocal relationship, and the health and life of individual and community. Art was prayer inspired by and for their kinship with creature, sky, soil, waters, light, darkness... and creator.
At Diaspora Gardens, we aspire to this. We invite the artistry of each person who joins us to be an integrated part of their healing, wholeness, identity, empowerment, and a part of their practice for cultivating community and kinship.
Our spirits are formed by living practices with the land and seasons, grounded in generations of faith for the seasons of our lives, our communities, our souls: Story, Dance, Worship, Retreats, Grounding, Memory, Connection, Companioning
We offer Worship Services & Events, Retreats, Conferences, Group & Individual Spiritual Companioning