Little City Gardens

Two of our favorite projects have recently launched kickstarter campaigns. We were so impressed by the power of this forum so we wanted to spread the word about these two inspiring already established organizations working both locally and nationally.

Produce to the People is a food justice non-profit organization in San Francisco, working to foster a community minded, local food system that considers and supports the need for fresh produce for all people in our city. Their mission and intention is “to build food security and community health through garden and food education, the creation of green jobs for youth, and the growth, harvest, and dispersal of organic backyard and community grown produce. Produce to the People promotes systemic change by addressing the multiple layers of creating food security, which includes providing fresh, healthy food to those in need, but is also coupled with empowering people to learn how to maintain a healthy diet, as well as help to create secure and just local food systems.”

The Greenhorns is a powerful network of new and young entrants into the field of agriculture. Their mission is “to promote, recruit and support young farmers in america”, which they do through, a film, a weekly radio show, an active blog, skillshares and mixers, a mapping and census project, publishing and distributing a guidebook. They are infinitely creative in the ways that they knit, elevate, spur and enliven the growing national young farming community.

More about The Greenhorns: “Three years after its founding in a basement in Berkeley, California, The Greenhorns has matured from an idea for a recruitment film into a widespread national community. We are now happily rooted on my first commercial farm, Smithereen, on rented land in the Hudson Valley of New York. In the autumn of 2007 we officially began seeking out mentors and characters for a film, traveling the country with a confident intuitive sense of an emerging movement of young farmers and a series of borrowed cameras and generous cinematographers. On the road for these 2 years we have found that the movement has emerged–scrappy, resourceful, adaptive young Americans have brought the products and the spirit of this movement into the sun, and we are proud to be the reporters of its successes and a hub for a much-needed centralized network.

This is America, and it takes all kinds. All over the country we have met enterprising, hopeful greenhorns: descendents of family dairies, punky inner-city gardeners, homesteaders, radical Christians, anarcho-activists, ex-suburbanites, graduates with biological science degrees, ex-teachers, ex-poets, ex-cowboys. The sons of traditional farmers, the daughters of migrant farm workers, the accidental agriculturalists and the deliberate career switchers all mark our maps. In foothills, warehouses, back valleys, and vacant lots they are popping up as we reclaim human spaces in the broad lazerland of Monoculture that has engulfed rural America.”