“Life will find the way, if you create the conditions for life. I thought maybe we should see if we can just pull that one off.”
The Captain, October 29, 2026. This page is that idea, itemized: everything we are building, everything we are asking grants for, and everything we mean to put in our neighbors' hands.
What we're building
The pictures first, because the pictures are the plan. Every design below is drawn, and most are priced. What they are waiting on is funding.
What we want to do
The build list, in the order the work wants to happen.
- The Poultry Palace and the chicken EDN — a palace for hens on a spine of circulating, filtered water, with the desert cooler inside it.
- The Little Ark and the learning path — the community food stand, and a path that teaches desert growing as you walk it.
- Orchard shade and the shaded walkway — living shade over the orchard, petal shade over the paths, misters, and a cool place to sit down.
- A public cooling center — solar, battery, and cold air for Borrego Springs on the days the desert tries to kill people.
- The wrapped fleet — the Little Ark Express, the Children's Joy Express, the Little Ark Treats truck, the outreach van, and the shower and laundry van, each one sponsored, each one working.
- The ARK Living Systems Research Campus — leased land with a house, a barn, and a pool, where the thirteen pillars get tested together at full scale, and a rescue herd of horses, mules, cows, and sheep heals in public and teaches as it goes.
What we're asking grants for
Honest labels: applied means applied, ready means the packet is built, and preparing means exactly that.
- San Diego County Neighborhood Reinvestment Program, $40,000 — the Poultry Palace and the EDN. Packet ready.
- MIT Solve 2027, $10,000 — the thirteen pillar system presented as one living invention. Ready for the November 6 deadline.
- CalAgPlate, $10,000 — desert growing education that asks almost nothing of people's time. In preparation.
- Awesome Foundation, $1,000 — the Little Ark food stand. Applied October 13, 2026.
- Rose Foundation, $5,000 — the desert soil research trial. Applied October 26, 2026.
- Community Clean Energy round, 2027 — the cooling center resilience hub. Preparing now, application by January 2027.
- A grant for the bridge between worlds — the website grown into a game, the game joined to the store, and the store joined to the real builds, so a person can walk from this page into the living garden, play at building the Ark, and buy into the very things we are building on the ground. Pieces of it already live: the playable gardens at /play/garden/ and /play/ark/, and the store. What the grant buys is the joining, and the full world on the other side of it. Wanted: an arts, technology, or innovation funder who understands crossing realities.
- Operations funding — the people who run all of it. The current hunt, and the one that makes the rest possible.
For our neighbors
The programmes the fleet carries, and the list they draw from. Dignity first, not bare survival.
- The food pantry — the Little Ark, stocked and rolling.
- Santa Patrol — a standing needs list, checked once or twice, goods flowing in through donation pipelines and out to anybody who needs them.
- The ice cream truck — because joy belongs in the restoration plan, too.
- Clothes, showers, and laundry — clean bodies, brighter days.
- Hair, makeup, babysitting, and house cleaning — the services that hand a person their life back and make them feel fantastic.
- Dental care that includes teeth — because nothing makes a person feel better than a pretty smile.
- The library — run, like every post here, by somebody who loves the work and holds it as their own. In the Captain's words: nobody is hired just to fill a chair; everybody has to love their job.
- Good safe electric vehicles and chargers, a computer, a television, a phone, and toys — the goods on the list, alongside a person who helps neighbors actually reach the help that already exists for them.
Live-in basics
Costs are real retail prices we found on public pages, approx., as of Sep 2026, before tax and shipping. Click a source to check it.
Help for the crew at home
Household help gives the captain and crew back hours for building the Ark.
Someday
A helper for the garden beds, once the basics are running.