Reweaving What We Segregated

Why the Garden Exists and What Nonprofits Quietly Reveal

By Josh Singleton | Founder, serving as Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project

“Our so-called civilized societies are more and more segregationist.”
— Léandre Bergeron, For the Sake of Our Children

Bergeron’s words are unsettling because they describe something we no longer question. Children are grouped with children. Working adults are grouped with working adults. Elders are grouped with elders. Each group is managed, supervised, measured, and contained. Interaction across generations is treated as inefficient, risky, or unnecessary.

This separation is not accidental. It has been normalized to the point of invisibility.

When it is questioned, the response is predictable. Both parents have to work. This is just how the world is now. There is no alternative.

But that explanation does not tell the truth.

What we have actually done is accept a system because it protects a desired lifestyle. We have normalized separation because it allows us to maintain speed, comfort, mobility, and consumption while transferring the slow, demanding work of formation to institutions.

Daycare did not become standard because it was best for children. It became standard because it made modern adult life possible. Compulsory schooling did not arise because communities were incapable of forming the young. It arose because industrial economies required predictable labor schedules. Elder care facilities expanded not only because families were unable to care, but because intergenerational life interfered with efficiency.

None of this was forced on us. It was adopted gradually, rationalized repeatedly, and defended loudly once it became inconvenient to imagine alternatives.

This does not mean parents are cruel or uncaring. It means we have confused provision with responsibility. We provide food, shelter, and opportunity, and then outsource presence, patience, and formation. We tell ourselves that love can be expressed at a distance and that supervision can replace relationship.

Bergeron refuses that logic outright.

“Frankly, I disagree. Daycare-orphanages are not normal. On the contrary, they are places as absurd as prisons. Healthy social relationships will not be found in prison or in daycare.”

His language is sharp because the structure itself is sharp. He is not attacking caregivers or teachers. He is naming what happens when care is industrialized and childhood is removed from the flow of real life.

“You see them walking along, these poor daycare children, the abandoned ones, harnessed to a leash in groups of six or eight, being taken for their daily walk by the daycare worker. Just like prisoners in the prison yard.”

The image is disturbing not because it is rare, but because it is ordinary. Movement without belonging. Safety without relationship. Supervision without formation. Children learn early that life happens elsewhere, and that they are managed until they are useful.

This pattern does not stop with childhood.

In schools, rivalries escalate because elders are absent. In universities, competition intensifies because formation is replaced with performance. In workplaces, adults are isolated from children and elders, reducing life to output. In elder care, wisdom is sidelined and infantilized, stripped of contribution and dignity.

Modern society has replaced relationship with management. Ratios replace responsibility. Institutions replace belonging. Metrics replace wisdom.

The nuclear family was never meant to carry this alone. For most of human history, children were formed in the presence of elders, and elders remained alive through the presence of children. Work was visible. Care flowed both directions. Learning happened by watching, imitating, failing, and trying again inside a living community.

When that fabric was torn, nonprofits emerged.

Not because communities suddenly became compassionate, but because natural relationships had been severed.

Nonprofits exist to patch what fragmentation creates. They mentor children whose fathers are absent. They tutor students whose schools cannot slow down. They feed families whose work does not sustain them. They provide companionship where elders have been removed from daily life.

This work is often sincere and sacrificial. Many people give themselves to it with real love. Lives are steadied. Harm is reduced. Immediate needs are met that should never be ignored.

But this work carries a hidden tension.

By stepping into the gaps created by separation, nonprofits often make that separation livable. They absorb the consequences of a fractured social order so the order itself does not have to change. Pain is relieved downstream instead of being allowed to surface upstream. Collapse is postponed. Awakening is delayed.

This becomes especially clear in mentoring.

Mentoring young men is often framed as an unquestionable good. And real good does happen. Stability increases. Trust forms. Damage is reduced.

But mentoring exists because fathers are absent. Sometimes through personal failure. Sometimes through incarceration, economic pressure, institutional housing, or cultural displacement. Often through a combination of all of it.

When mentoring becomes a substitute rather than a bridge, it quietly excuses the system from restoring fathers to daily life.

There is another contradiction that rarely gets named.

Pulling men away from their own homes to mentor other people’s children can recreate the very absence it claims to heal. A man gives his evenings. He shows up faithfully for someone else’s child. He is praised for his service. Meanwhile, his own children receive what is left. No one calls it neglect because it is sanctified by service.

Fatherhood is not restored. It is reassigned.

Even when mentoring is done with care, its typical rhythm reveals a deeper limitation.

I have done the mentoring. The weekly visit. The one hour to talk. Influence does come, but it comes slowly. And life does not pause outside that hour. Family needs continue. Work demands press in. Fatigue accumulates. Formation that requires shared life never quite fits into the container.

That is not personal failure. It is structural truth.

Formation cannot be compressed into spare time.

When mentoring lives on the margins of already fragmented lives, it stretches people thinner instead of rooting them deeper. Influence remains partial because presence is intermittent.

This same fragmentation quietly shapes nonprofit leadership itself.

For most Executive Directors, this work is a job. It is paid, scheduled, evaluated, and bounded. Even when the mission is relational, the posture is professional. Even when the work is about healing fragmentation, the role often requires compartmentalization to function.

The Executive Director goes to work to fix what is broken elsewhere, then returns home to a separate life. Mission is divided from family. Calling is divided from daily rhythm. Wholeness is advocated for professionally while life remains segmented personally.

This is not hypocrisy. It is inheritance.

Modern nonprofit leadership mirrors corporate leadership, not communal life. The Executive Director becomes a manager of outcomes, a steward of systems, a translator between suffering and funding. Their effectiveness depends on distance, clarity, and control.

This creates an unspoken dissonance. Leaders are exhausted not only because the work is hard, but because their lives are split. They carry other people’s wholeness while carefully guarding their own boundaries so the machine can keep running.

And beneath that dissonance is another layer that is even harder to face.

We do not only carry what the system hands us. We go looking for weight to carry.

Out of our desire to help, to serve, to be faithful, we scan for problems. We insert ourselves into fractures we did not create and cannot heal. We confuse availability with calling. We mistake empathy for ownership. We take on burdens that belong to fathers, families, neighborhoods, economies, and cultures, and then call the exhaustion obedience.

This is not humility. It is disordered responsibility.

The system benefits from this posture. It rewards those willing to absorb pain voluntarily. It elevates people who will carry what others will not. It calls them leaders and servants. Meanwhile, nothing upstream has to change because someone else is willing to suffer in its place.

And we cooperate.

Not because we are arrogant, but because we are sincere.
Not because we seek power, but because we want to help.

Over time, this problem-seeking becomes identity. If we are not carrying something heavy, we begin to wonder who we are.

But much of what we carry was never ours to carry.

There is a difference between responding to what is placed in your hands and searching for something to hold so you can feel faithful. One is obedience. The other is compulsion.

This is where the sickness sets in.

The body knows it. The soul resists it. Something inside us rejects the role of perpetual buffer that keeps a broken system comfortable.

The garden offers a different posture.

In the garden, you do not go looking for problems. You respond to what is in front of you. The soil tells you what it needs. The season limits what you can do. You cannot fix everything. You cannot carry every bed. You cannot rush growth.

The work is bounded. And because it is bounded, it is honest.

This question surfaces even in our own family. We are asked about peer-to-peer socialization for our sons. The concern is well intentioned and culturally conditioned.

What we have found is something different.

Our sons are immersed in a multigenerational community that tends the garden alongside us. They spend time with elders, working adults, teenagers, and other children, not sorted by age but woven into shared rhythms.

The garden, to them, is where their dad works. But it is also an extension of our family.

They know where they belong. They know who they can learn from. They know who needs help carrying a watering can or remembering where tools belong. They learn restraint with elders, curiosity with adults, and imagination with younger children.

They welcome everyone who comes to the garden as if they were family. Not because they were taught to, but because belonging was never abstracted.

Peer interaction still happens. It is simply not the foundation. Contribution is.

This is what intergenerational life restores.

Children do not need constant mirroring of themselves. They need context. They need to see who they are becoming by watching people at different stages of life live faithfully where they are.

The garden does not fix fragmentation by scaling services. It removes the conditions that made those services necessary in the first place.

In the garden, leadership is not extracted from life. It is lived. Work, family, formation, and responsibility overlap. Mentorship happens by proximity. Fatherhood is visible. Elders remain participants. No one is sorted by age. Everyone is sorted by presence.

This is not nostalgia. It is ecological.

Healthy ecosystems require diversity. So do human ones. When you remove an age group, the system destabilizes. When you reintroduce it, balance begins to return.

The garden also resists consumption culture without preaching against it. You cannot binge a carrot. You cannot rush compost. You cannot outsource patience.

Value is not extracted. It is cultivated.

People who spend time in this kind of space often cannot explain what is happening. They just know they feel calmer. More grounded. Less anxious. Less hungry for distraction.

This is what Bergeron meant when he said a healthy person is a terrible consumer. And a healthy community is even worse.

The garden does not scale like an institution. It spreads like yeast. Slowly. Quietly. Through shared work and shared life.

In a society built on segregation, the garden becomes a quiet act of resistance.

Not because it is loud.
But because it refuses to live divided.