Community Harvest

Community Harvest

The Community Harvest Program serves to reconnect our most vulnerable communities back to the land, advancing our urban farms, parks, and other greenspaces as a vital mechanism for providing various types of culturally relevant programming such as nutrition and cooking classes, environmental stewardship job trainings, safe gathering spaces for advocacy and change, after-school youth programs while also providing fresh and organic produce to low income families. 

Community Harvest is designed to be a working model for city-wide efforts in our Think Outside initiative, which seeks to help meet critical human and environmental needs by reconnecting DC’s two greatest but most forgotten assets: our vast network of public green spaces, the highest percentage of any major city in North America, and our deep base of people and communities who care. Parks & People’s own urban agriculture sites, the Marvin Gaye Greening Center and the Columbia Heights Green, provide year-round healthy food and programming opportunities for public land reclamation, green planning and design, arts and cultural events,  job training, volunteer support, and advocacy for community greening efforts.

Seedbeds of Change

 At the Greening Center, Parks & People and our many community partners conduct year-round intensive permaculture farming of sustainable organic healthy food while providing a base of workforce development and learning for people of all ages about farming, environmental reclamation, and land stewardship.  At the Green, Parks & People has transformed our community garden into a mini-farm – where instead of assigned individual garden plots, the entire site is community-grown and harvested. This communal approach produces a much higher quantity and quality of food. Over half of all food produced is donated to Sacred Heart and Martha’s Table, a homeless services agency whose clients are now at the center of the team tending the Green.  In 2020, both the Green and the Greening Center will open on-site farm kitchens to provide food preparation and nutrition demonstrations.

Farm to Table

Through connection with the Riverside Healthy Living Center around the corner from the Greening Center, Parks & People is developing DC’s first comprehensive Healthy Food Hub. A model of full-circle food production, preparation, distribution and consumption is enabled through the incubation of seedlings at Riverside as well as the use of Riverside’s newly renovated commercial kitchen, café and community hall as a site for healthy cooking classes, catering, and other food-based enterprise.

Interested in joining Parks & People’s Community Harvest Network? Call us at 202-462-7275.

Visit our list of Farmers Markets in DC, Virginia, and Maryland to find a Farmers Market near you!

 

Additional Community Harvest Resources

Community Harvest Resources