Cabarete Sostenible

Cabarete Sostenible (CS) is a project based in the town of Cabarete, a town in the north coast of the Dominican Republic. It is Dominican-led, and uses active participation to ensure community ownership of the project. It began in April 2020 as a response to the urgent need for food that residents faced when tourism closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Cabarete is recognized worldwide as a destination for watersports, but tourism development does not contribute to the prosperity of the local population.
Cabarete Sostenible divides its work into four key areas:

• Emergency food aid
• Civic agriculture and food sovereignty
• Regeneration of the land
• Support to local entrepreneurs.

The project maintains a ‘social justice approach’ which to Cabarete Sostenible means leading with all food sovereignty efforts with anti-racist and decolonial perspectives. So far it has:

• Provided 3,700 nutritious food packages benefiting an estimated 13,600 people.
• Created a community kitchen, garden and farm which draw on ancestral knowledge, permaculture and regenerative forestry techniques.
• Used these spaces to provide workshops for local women to create products with local ingredients and excess harvests from the farm and garden.