Heifer International's Urban Agriculture Program

Building Communities, Improving Lives

From rooftops to vacant lots, Heifer International’s Urban Agriculture program is growing goodness, changing lives and building communities in the heart of North America’s big cities.

Heifer supports grassroots organizations that help communities reclaim and support local food systems.

• Inner-city youth learn entrepreneurial skills and the value of healthy eating by planting vegetables, growing flowers, and selling produce to local markets.
• Immigrants share community gardens and their indigenous agricultural practices, which builds bridges between cultures.
• Disabled citizens use therapeutic gardening to reconnect with the earth and their communities.

The video "Seeds, Hope and Concrete" features the “growing power” of Heifer projects in Brooklyn, Chicago, Little Rock, Toronto and Wisconsin. To learn how to order the DVD, call 1-800-422-0474.

Increased Income and Nutrition

From Field to Table in Toronto

Field to Table, a program of FoodShare Metro Toronto, provides fresh produce directly into urban communities through alternative distribution networks. It also provides employment and training to youth through its urban agricultural program. Their new bee project will enable Field to Table and two other Toronto community-based organizations to improve nutrition and increase employment opportunities for youth and women through the production and sale of hone products from rooftop beehives.
 

Community Building

The City Farms Project

New York's City Farms Program is a network of organizational partners that supports community gardens and enables gardeners to contribute to their communities' food security by growing more food, and distributing and marketing it within the community.

Technical workshops and a toolkit of urban agriculture methods and resources, along with building capacity of local leaders allows City Farms to transform urban gardens into urban farms.

Skills Training

Skills Training Leads to Growing Power

In some Urban Agriculture projects, food security or environmental improvements take a back-seat to skills training, utilizing Heifer's Training and Education Cornerstone. One such project is Growing Power, based in Milwaukee.

Growing Power's goal is to expand their Community Food Centers (CFCs) to become national training centers for urban agriculture groups. They work with communities in Milwaukee and Chicago to plan, train, develop and monitor the building of CFCs so that technical knowledge and skills can be passed on from one center to another.

The CFC's provide this technical training and marketing support in order to help communities improve access to healthy foods and economic development opportunities. Growing Power's CFCs base their training on Heifer's time-tested model of participatory community development, teaching participants skills like planning, monitoring and evaluating along with agricultural and entrepreneurial techniques.

Transforming the Environment

From Gang Areas to Lush Gardens

In 1994, HBO produced a documentary about the heavy gang and drug activity taking place in Little Rock's Centennial Park. Today, the Inner City Futurenet's Neighborhood Pride Program  has transformed the park into a beautiful playground and family center.

At-risk and low-income youth continue to keep the park clean and and bursting with flowers and other plants, while they also earn supplemental income and learn a variety of entrepreneurial skills.

Youth Emphasis

God's Gang Plants Dreams

Chicago's urban agriculture projects are testament to the dramatic social changes that occur with these programs. Youth are inspired, empowered and interested in carving out new lives for themselves - lives filled with promise and hope.

One such project is God's Gang Planting Dreams: Worms and Fish.  God's Gang is a community outreach program dedicated to supporting and strengthening residents of a public housing community. The adult leaders and youth members of God's Gang learned about Heifer's urban initiative in 1997; since then, they've met to plan and implement worms and fish projects with the objective of contributing their families' income.

And each limited-resource family or individual will benefit from urban agriculture as well, because the projects will:

• Reinvigorate their entrepreneurial spirit

• Teach them how to maintain and sustainably use green spaces and healthy soil
• Offer them the healing touch that comes from bringing animals, land and people together
• Reconnect them with their food sources
• Help them build strong neighborhood alliances

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