Cultivating Pathways to Freedom
Through Food & Healing
Rooted in growing food, we cultivate nourishing environments which promote health, economic development, healing, & creativity through urban agriculture.
Urban Growers Collective is a Black- and women-led non-profit farm in Chicago, Illinois working to build a more just and equitable local food system. We aim to address the inequities and structural racism that exist in the food system and in communities of color. Rooted in growing food, our mission is to cultivate nourishing environments which support health, economic development, healing, and creativity through urban agriculture.
We provide hands-on job training and create economic opportunity for youth, and beginner BIPOC farmers. Our aim is to provide jobs while working to mitigate food insecurity and limited access to affordable, culturally-affirming, and nutritionally-dense food.
Our team cultivates eight urban farms on 11 acres of land, predominantly located on Chicago’s South Side. These farms are production-oriented but also offer opportunities for staff-led education, training, and leadership development. Our produce is available at farmers’ markets, in our Collective Supported Agriculture program, and via our Fresh Moves Mobile Market buses.
Pathways to Health
At Urban Growers Collective we are cultivating new pathways to health that empower neighbors and communities to shape their own wellbeing.
We connect our neighbors to locally-grown, nutritional, affordable, and culturally-affirming food. We also invest in developing local food economies through urban farming, job training, and education. This connects growers and marketplaces to eaters, building long-term resilience to further divestment in Chicago’s communities of color.
Our Fresh Moves Mobile Market is a bus that has been converted into a mobile farmers’ market. We served over 14,400 customers through Fresh Moves in 2023. Our “produce aisle on wheels” brings affordable produce to schools, community centers, churches, and health clinics, making good food accessible in communities of color that have been historically divested.
Pathways to Household Wealth
Urban Growers Collective cultivates nourishing environments where the passion for growing food in Chicago thrives from generation to generation—from our Educare Preschool Farm that provides hands-on garden based learning, to our Youth Corps teen education and employment program, internships, and Apprenticeship programs. Our programs connect into a life-long pathway that allows participants to enter (and reenter) at any age and any stage of their life. Pathways to economic development allow local families to grow together and connect through urban agriculture and the food system.
Our Youth Corps teen education and employment program engages 150 youth each year on our farms. Teens expand their understanding of urban farming and deepen personal development through an inquiry-based STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) curriculum, while also receiving a stipend for their work.
Pathways to Community Wealth
Urban Growers Collective uses urban agriculture to develop local markets to cultivate pathways for historically disinvested communities in Chicago to build economic wealth. We are fostering a holistic local food system by and for our communities. As UGC connects eaters to markets through programs like the Fresh Moves Mobile Market, we emphasize the importance of growers in those markets.
The Grower Apprenticeship program empowers emerging growers with foundational farm skills to work toward financially, environmentally, and socially sustainable farm operations. Our Grower Apprenticeship Program provides new and emerging growers with hands-on training in urban agriculture production and cooperative business models as a foundation to increasing food security, food sovereignty, and economic opportunity within the Chicago region. This 3-year practical adult education-training program guides participants towards commercially viable farm operations via cooperative growing, aggregation, and profit sharing.
Pathways to Healing & Creativity
Urban Growers Collective creates pathways to healing & creativity by engaging Chicagoans in ancestral and cultural spiritual practices on land stewarded with those practices in mind. As a Black-led organization, we provide safe spaces for building mutually beneficial relationships founded on trust, fostering a multigenerational, multicultural, community devoted to the support of everyone’s healing.
Your support ensures that UGC can continue to cultivate our farms as spaces for spiritual healing, medicinal practice, and infusing the arts into our wellness practices. This essential work heals generational and community traumas and writes new shared narratives that foster creativity and cooperation in our communities.
The Urban Growers Collective Community Herbalism Apprenticeship offers the opportunity for participants to engage with plants; to build a relationship with plants; and ultimately, to use plants for personal, family, and community healing.
Our Impact in 2023
$19,300
in need-based stipends participants in our internship program.
23,000
pounds of produce harvested from our farms and distributed to the community
270,000
pounds of produce distributed via our Fresh Moves Mobile Market.
742
RSVP’s to public events and workshops.
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