The Bilingual Botanical Bus
A Mobile Holistic Herbal Clinic Serving Sonoma County
by Dawn Emery Ballantine
We certainly live in interesting times. Most of us have had to pivot our lives and our businesses in order to create a modicum of normalcy during this pandemic. For many folks in northern California, however, this type of life-upending crisis was already the norm before COVID, dating from the big fires in 2017 which did so much damage in Mendocino and Sonoma counties and surrounding areas. And as always, in times of trouble, good things can arise from the ashes, like the community-based service non-profit known as The Botanical Bus.
When the Tubbs Fire plagued the Santa Rosa area in 2017, a local herbal apothecary—Farmacopia—turned their store into a free clinic for weeks, offering support, advice, referrals, and herbal medicinals to help meet the needs of the community. Lily Mazzarella, owner of Farmacopia, and Jocelyn Boreta, a staff member, realized that this support was essential for their community, and they set about finding a way to continue to meet that need. This brainstorming led them to co-found The Botanical Bus Bilingual Mobile Herb Clinic.
Jocelyn, now Executive Director of The Botanical Bus, has learned that crisis shines a light on health inequities, as we have clearly seen with COVID-19. And during the 2017 fires, particularly in the case of Sonoma County’s Latinx community—largely farm- and vineyard-workers—these inequities were intensified due to deficits in social determinants of health such as workplace safety, toxic stress, limited legal status, lack of health insurance, and unequal access to emergency financial assistance. Not surprisingly, Jocelyn found that 90% of the evacuees in the evacuation centers were Latinx immigrants, with limited family, resources, insurance, or safety net. Jocelyn and Lily felt that “the call to action was getting more and more urgent.”
This grassroots project is grounded in community and took its baby steps in the Land Path Bayer Farm community garden, in conjunction with a group known as Cultivando para Salud (Farming for Health). Started by social worker Angeles Quiñones, every Friday for the past three years, until the COVID shutdown, Jocelyn and Angeles met with a group of mostly immigrant, Spanish-speaking women from Peru and Mexico to learn about plants and to share ideas about recipes, remedies, herbal medicine, and nutrition. The group grew in a familial way, celebrating births, mourning the passing of members, and dealing with the short and long term effects of the fires. Jocelyn believes that “the knowledge in the community is profound … and needs to be recognized, and celebrated, and empowered … Link that with health equity, then we have a thriving population.”
The Botanical Bus is based on a three-pronged approach, which began with the community gardens project. They subsequently launched the Promotoras de Salud program (Community Health Workers), staffed by women from a full range of backgrounds and expertise who provide educational trainings and workshops. Though staff feared that these might be more difficult given COVID in-person meeting restrictions, they were surprised that the move onto the Internet ultimately enriched the meetings. Suddenly, they had folks joining in from disparate parts of Sonoma County, and even from as far away as Michoacan, thus connecting sections of the community in ways that hadn’t been possible before.
The final step in the plan was the Botanical Bus itself, a mobile holistic herbal clinic which launched in September 2020, providing services to farmworkers and the Latinx community. The mobile clinic offers a range of care including acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal medicine, massage therapy, homeopathy, and more, while adhering to COVID safety measures. A free lunch of tamales and herbal aguas frescas is also provided.
The two-hour clinics currently take place at La Luz in Sonoma, La Plaza in Santa Rosa, Corazón Healdsburg, and at Red Car Wine vineyard (shout out to them for taking special care of their workers!). While the original plan was to take the bus around to the various vineyards, that has proven a bit more difficult than envisioned. They hope to build partnerships with vineyard owners to make this a reality in the near future.
One of the foundational goals of The Botanical Bus is to partner with at least ten other community organizations in their work. To that end, they have created relationships with many organizations such as Traditional Medicinals, Galen’s Way, Tadine’s Tea Company, Mercy Wellness, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, Be Here Farm in St. Helena (which tragically burned in the most recent Glass Fire), The California School of Herbal Studies, and with Daily Acts in Petaluma. Jocelyn enthuses that “the connectivity between non-profits in Sonoma County is super inspiring and empowering.”
And during this current pandemic, cooperation is essential. The Latinx community makes up only 26% of Sonoma County’s population, but they comprise 80% of the diagnosed cases, harkening back to the social determinants of health. So, says Jocelyn, “Let’s sink into the power that our Latinx community has, the power to nurture, the power to heal with culturally relevant forms of healing … There is tremendous displacement within the immigrant community, and the power of herbal medicine connects people to place, cultural identity, family, and tradition, and is really needed right now.”
The group recently launched an emergency mutual aid project with the help of Daily Acts. Since the women can no longer access their community gardens,The Botanical Bus brought the gardens to them. Their partner organizations donated 4,000 organic medicinal and culinary plant starts which are culturally relevant (think salsa garden), organic soil, seeds, bilingual literature about planting and care, and five- and 10-gallon Geopots. These Geopots make it all possible for folks who live in small places with no garden land around them. The project was eagerly welcomed by the community.
Happily, the Community Garden project is slowly beginning again. One group recently planted 70 organic herbs in the community medicine garden at La Plaza family service center in Santa Rosa. They will hold COVID-safe workshops in the garden once a month, led by the promotoras, who are now paid to teach the workshops. The topics are seasonal and include building immunity, respiratory health, wellness, and la cosecha (the harvest). The herbs are donated by local herb companies and the California School of Herbal Studies. As Jocelyn says, “We thrive off of partnerships. Partnership is everything.”
Jocelyn is justifiably proud of the program. Her grandmother and great-grandmother were farmworkers. Jocelyn grew up in Sonoma County, and though she left for 10 years, she returned when her children were small and re-invented her life, choosing to focus on what she could do to help her family thrive and to show up in her community. The early years of the program were tough, as grassroots organizing is time-consuming and all her time was unpaid. Then the press began to take an interest, and Farmacopia offered to help launch the non-profit.
True to their mission statement, they launched the Botanical Bus with a crowdsourcing campaign, raising $20,000 within 30 days. They are still figuring out the details of board development and how to secure ongoing funding, as current support is from temporary grants, sponsorships from the herb industry, and individual donors. Their goal is to secure enough consistent funding to permit them to grow their foundation programs and expand to new ones to meet the emerging needs of the community.
The next planned emergency mutual aid campaign reflects a new coalition between The Botanical Bus and Sonoma County, which recently launched the CURA project to organize doctors, nurses and community health advocates to provide outreach to farmworkers around COVID-19. The Botanical Bus’s promotoras are going through the training now and will be hired as community health advocates, bringing their skills into the field.
The joint campaign will also distribute Care Kits to everyone who attends the mobile clinics and to the farmworkers who attend CURA’s meetings. The goal is to distribute 500 bags, which contain an herbal healing salve, chapstick, medicinal teas, and referrals to community resources for both physical and mental health. They hope to raise $5,000 via VenMo for the project to cover the costs of the kits.
Jocelyn has witnessed the way that ”herbal medicine connects people to their identity, to their abuelita, the plants their families threw into soups, the smells, the earth where they’re from.” There is a wealth of knowledge of herbal medicine and nutrition in the elders of the community. Gathering together across generations to learn more about nutrition and health is helping to teach an often undervalued workforce to value themselves as human beings with the potential to thrive, by prioritizing their health and wellness in a culturally relevant way. And in these interesting times, we could all benefit from this lesson.
The Botanical Bus is based in Sonoma County. Help and learn about their trainings and clinic locations at www.thebotanicalbus.org. If vineyards wish for their workers to have these Care Kits, they can contact the Botanical Bus for distribution, at no charge.
Dawn Emery Ballantine lives in Boonville, where she curates and sells books at Hedgehog Books, edits this magazine, and is always happily surprised by all the folks doing good in the world.
