Understanding grows fastest when people do something useful together. Through community partnerships, Pagan EdNet affiliate groups work beside congregations of other faiths on projects that serve their own towns.
How Partnerships Work
Pagan EdNet does not run local projects from a central office. Our affiliate groups, which include covens, groves, kindreds, student groups, and community circles, choose projects that suit their own communities and invite neighbors of other faiths to take part, or join projects those neighbors have already begun. We supply planning guides, publicity templates, and advice, and we connect groups that are doing similar work.
Volunteer coordination is led by board member Bronwen Kessler with the Director of Interfaith Outreach.
Seasonal Projects
Many affiliates tie their service to the festivals of the Wheel of the Year, when the season itself suggests the work.
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Equinox Harvest Drive
At the autumn equinox, a festival of thanksgiving, affiliates collect food for local pantries, often together with nearby congregations. In 2025, groups in 31 communities collected about 9,400 pounds of food.
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Tending Days
Between the spring equinox and Beltane, volunteers of many faiths clear litter from parks, stream banks, and roadsides, plant trees, and restore native plants. In 2026, Tending Days were held at 44 sites.
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Yule Warmth Collection
In the weeks before the winter solstice, affiliates gather coats, blankets, and socks for local shelters and warming centers, in partnership with whichever local groups are already doing this work.
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Samhain Remembrance
Around the end of October some affiliates join other communities in tending neglected cemeteries or in services of remembrance for those who died without family.
Shared Observances
Graduates of our representative training regularly take part in:
- community services of thanksgiving in which each tradition offers a reading or a blessing;
- vigils of mourning and solidarity after a tragedy or an attack on any community;
- seasonal open houses, where congregations and Pagan groups visit one another's celebrations as guests;
- panels in schools, libraries, and colleges where several traditions answer the same questions side by side.
Local Roundtables
Several affiliates have helped to start local versions of our Seat at the Table roundtable: a regular, informal meeting of clergy and lay leaders over coffee, with one question for everyone to answer. We provide a starter guide with a year of discussion questions. Write to interfaith@paganednet.org to request it.
Ground Rules for Shared Projects
- The work comes first. A food drive is for feeding people. It is not a platform for any group's message.
- Everyone is named, or no one is. Publicity lists all partner groups equally, and only with each group's permission.
- No recruitment. No partner distributes religious literature to the people being served.
- Follow the lead of the host. When joining an existing project, accept its rules and its ways of working.
- Protect privacy. Volunteers are not photographed or named without consent.
- Give thanks afterward. A short note to every partner, and an invitation to do it again, is how a single event becomes a relationship.
Start a Partnership
If You Are Part of a Pagan Group
Begin small. Ask a local pantry, park department, or shelter what it actually needs. Then invite one congregation you already know something about, by a personal letter to a named person. If your group is not yet affiliated with Pagan EdNet, see Affiliate Groups.
If You Lead a Congregation or a Service Organization
We would be glad to introduce you to a Pagan EdNet affiliate near you, if there is one. Write to interfaith@paganednet.org with your location and the project you have in mind. Our guide For Faith Leaders answers the questions that hosts most often ask.
We had been neighbors for eleven years without speaking. Then their grove turned up at our pantry with a truck full of squash. Now we plan the autumn drive together.
Lay leader of a partner congregation, 2025