City Growers

Mission:

City Growers uses urban agriculture to engage youth in experiential learning, nurturing a life-long relationship to food, their health, and the natural world. In a city, green space is precious, so our programming focuses on nontraditional spaces such as rooftop farms, school gardens and spaces reclaimed by nature. City Growers’ hands-on, original curriculum is designed to foster a love of urban nature, an understanding of the urban ecosystem, and empower New York City youth to be changemakers.

City Growers History

City Growers was established in 2011 by the founders of the Brooklyn Grange to explore the educational potential of a rooftop farm. Brooklyn Grange, a commercial farm, offered tours to youth who expressed amazement at everything from where carrots came from, to that food could even be grown in a City. Many expressed that nature did not belong to them, and that it was for “other people.” To combat this and establish equity by offering free high quality tours, City Growers was formed and staffed with trained educators to build an experiential nature based curriculum that allows urban youth to see New York City as a thriving ecosystem, and give them the tools to sustain that ecosystem.

Programs and Impact

City Growers’ programs include rooftop farm workshops, after school programs, summer camps, high school skills-training programs (beekeeping and urban agriculture), classroom and school garden workshops and residencies. Through our programming, outreach and highly subsidized rates, City Growers is committed to ensuring that the young people who need our programs the most — those attending Title 1 schools with limited resources, those living in neighborhoods with few green spaces, and those who lack opportunities to meaningfully interact with the natural world due to socioeconomic constraints — can access them.

Why is City Growers Unique?

City Growers is unique because we show that nature can thrive in a City- on fire escapes, rooftops, to street tree patches, to the cracks in pavement- and we develop original programming that corresponds to those places. Our curriculum focuses on pollinators and the urban ecosystem, and we offer the only program in New York City that trains, and pays, teenagers to be beekeepers. All our curriculum is science aligned and focused on social emotional development.