Our mission is to build resilience to climate change by empowering rural communities to restore, steward, and sustain their lands for future generations.
The Tikkun Institute for Ecological Restoration and Regenerative Agriculture (TIERRA) is a living laboratory for ecological restoration in the semi-arid highlands of Central Mexico. We are located just outside the beautiful World Heritage city of San Miguel de Allende.
Since 2008, we have transformed our 7.5-acre demonstration center into an oasis of abundance by capturing rain, rebuilding soils, growing food, propagating native plants, and learning how damaged ecosystems regenerate. Today our work extends into the rural communities of the Upper Río Laja watershed.
While the city of San Miguel is known for its colorful colonial streets and arts culture, was voted “best small city in the world” six times, most visitors don’t know that our bioregion, the Altiplano Río Laja watershed, is suffering severe ecological and economic threats: aquifer depletion and water scarcity, deforestation, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and growing food insecurity - all of it exacerbated by the impacts of climate change.
These challenges disproportionately affect the rural communities surrounding San Miguel, which visitors rarely see. They comprise over 60% of the population of the Municipality.
Centuries of deforestation and environmental degradation, combined with the dismantling of rural support systems following Mexico's debt crisis of the 1980s, has left many campesino villages increasingly vulnerable to social collapse that leads to mass migration. Our state of Guanajuato has the 3rd highest rate of migration to the northern border in all of Mexico.
At Tikkun, we work at the intersection of water, land, biodiversity, agriculture and rural livelihoods, because these systems cannot be repaired separately. Our core restoration work —Planting for Change and Agua Para la Vida— form a holistic model of ecological and social resilience that can be scaled up, and replicated throughout Mexico.
We know from our own experience that living systems can regenerate when we restore the conditions that sustain life. That is the work we believe our time requires.
Tikkun is a project of the Centro por Ecología y Economía Sustentable de San Miguel de Allende (CEESMA) A.C.