Deep within the heart of the Duke Lemur Center’s vast campus, you’ll find a small patch of land speckled with fruit trees and vegetables.
This is the secret garden known as “Charlie’s Food Forest,” named after Charlie Welch, who led conversation programs for the Lemur Center for 35 years before retiring in 2024. It is a playground of pawpaws, blueberries, corn, beans and, among other circulating crops, sumac – the leafy green snack of choice for many lemurs.
Every week Welch, Lemur Center staff and a dozen or so volunteers spread out among the planted beds to harvest organic goodies to supplement the diets of the center’s more than 200 resident primates.
“That makes me happy,” Welch says. “I was really afraid that when we put the message out for volunteers to help, that nobody would want to do it.”
But much to his satisfaction, Welch says, a bounty of volunteers showed up. Inspired by a collective mission to care for land and lemurs, they continued to return to weed and till and plant. And slowly, something else began to sprout: It was hope.
“There are really beautiful things that come out of it,” says Sheri Taylor, a Lemur Center staff specialist and horticulturalist, who leads the volunteers into the food forest each week. “We are out here sweating in 100-degree weather, in almost freezing temperatures. But we start talking about our lives and find that common ground with people who we otherwise wouldn’t necessarily have met. I leave feeling like, ‘OK, I’m ready. I’m energized.’”
That feeling of hope and resiliency – especially in the midst of ever-growing climate and ecological challenges – is spreading through community-driven projects focused on restoring ecosystems, says Liz DeMattia, a Duke research scientist who leads the Duke University Marine Lab Community Science Initiative, a university effort to collaborate with communities through conservation, education and outreach.
When a community comes together in the midst of a climate disturbance – a flood or a hurricane, for example – they often are left to deal with the difficult aftermath, DeMattia says.
But they can recover – just like an ecosystem, she says.
“We talk about environmental resilience all the time, like ecosystems bouncing back from fire, from succession in a forest,” DeMattia says. “[We can use] nature as a way to understand personal and community resilience. By restoring nature, you’re restoring yourself.”
In the last several years, DeMattia and several other Duke professors have led a series of co-curricular opportunities focused on fostering resilience as part of programs like Bass Connections, which brings together teams of professors and students to conduct collaborative research that can have real impacts on local communities, and DukeEngage, an immersive summer program centered on volunteerism and community engagement throughout the world.
Students have studied how using art and storytelling can help a community understand the anxiety of enduring a climate event. They have put those learnings into practice by working with local grade school children to write poems about their experiences during Hurricane Helene, which caused catastrophic flooding in North Carolina in 2024.
They have co-written a book of fables that connect moments of resiliency in nature – such as an oyster reef regenerating itself after a storm – to attributes of personal resiliency. They have created giant puppets and performed stories about resiliency at community festivals. And they have begun working with North Carolina teachers to develop a climate resiliency curriculum for middle school students, which has traveled across six school districts from Buncombe County in the mountains to Carteret County on the coast.
Senior Hannah Baetge, a member of the Bass Connections team, says she got involved as a way to do her part in mobilizing her community to care.
A lifelong ice skater from California, Baetge grew up learning how nature could inspire her art. Her grandmother, also an ice skater, coached Baetge and would take her on outings to witness nature at work.
“She would bring me out into flower meadows. We would go out to the beach, and she would say, ‘Look at that tree! Look at how the leaves are dancing.’ And then we would dance,” Baetge says. “And I think I really did become connected and consciously understand how nature can inspire.”
In the middle school classroom, where Baetge has been teaching students the resiliency curriculum, she’s witnessed something key.
“I remember a couple kids who came up to me, and I asked them, ‘What is the biggest thing you learned from doing this curriculum with me?’” she says. “And [they said], ‘It's just be kind to other people,’ which kind of sounds corny, but I think that is something that's important for getting people to create effective solutions for conservation. If we do it right and if we do it thoughtfully, we can see how we can foster this kind of care for the environment and also for each other.”
In all, DeMattia says, the positive outcomes have multiplied.
“It actually has rippling effects to the community, to the school, to the teachers actually being excited and connected across the state in ways that they weren’t before,” she says.
But the process of building that community so hope and resiliency can grow?
“It’s slow,” DeMattia says. “And there’s no way that it can be anything but slow because when you work with community, you go where they want you to go – that’s within your capacity – and it’s sometimes nowhere that you thought you would go.”
Back closer to Durham’s campus, Duke emergency pediatrician Dr. Clay Bordley says he understands how the journey can zigzag.
For more than a decade, Bordley has been growing trees on his 27-acre farm and trying to give them away to the Durham community through organizations such as Keep Durham Beautiful, a local nonprofit focused on litter prevention and community greening across the city.
Bordley’s goal has been to help build Durham’s tree canopy and to mitigate the effects of rising temperatures – especially in underserved communities that may have less access to green space.
The City of Durham hopes to plant 8,500 new trees by 2028 with the help of Keep Durham Beautiful to achieve a tree canopy across more than half of the city. In addition to providing shade and keeping body temperatures down, a larger tree canopy helps to clean the air, absorb stormwater and sequester carbon.
Two thousand or so of those trees were grown on Bordley’s farm, which he started in 2014, he says.
But planting trees was never the plan.
Bordley bought the land for an organic farming venture with his daughter, but when the pair discovered the soil had been stripped of nutrients by decades of tobacco farming, Bordley decided to pivot to trees.
On a walk across an oak-filled East Campus during the fall, when the trees were dropping their acorns, Bordley gathered up grocery bags full and took them back to the farm. A few months later, Bordley had the seedlings of hundreds of oaks, which led to a mélange of maple, magnolia, mulberry, pecan, peach, apple – “You name it,” Bordley says – and a pine forest wrapping his farm like a hug.
“It’s becoming this oasis for us,” he says. “You just walk, and you feel like, ‘Oh my God, this kind of goes on forever.’”
For Bordley, being among the trees has been cathartic. On Christmas Day this past December, a child died in the ER during one of his shifts. Spending time on the farm helped Bordley process the tragedy, he says.
Inviting others to join him in that experience is one way Bordley feels like he can pay forward all he’s gained.
“I think everybody’s mental health would be better if they could be in a place like this a couple of times a month,” he says. “Anybody who gets interested, I’m like, ‘Come back. Come! Come! I don’t care. I don’t need to be here. Come around.’ Nature has such healing properties.”
Story by story, a similar experience is shared among many participants in projects focused on ecosystem restoration and climate resiliency.
Back in the Lemur Center’s food forest, Sheri Taylor is giving instructions to the volunteers and trading garden tips. There is a graduate student on an IVF journey hoping to have her first child. A nurse who battles depression. A former Hollywood lighting tech who escaped the California wildfires. Working alongside each other every week has helped them feel more hopeful and positive in the world they are creating together, they all said.
And for Taylor, it’s only just beginning. “It’s having this common goal,” she says. “Hope can be a struggle when you look too far out. But if you’re able to focus on what’s in front of you – seeing the progress – it gives me that little bit of hope.”