Work.
From growing food to restoring homes, our work creates opportunity, builds skills, and strengthens our community from the inside.
ON THIS PAGE: F.A.R.M.S. | A.R.I.S.E. | HIRE US
Feeding the COmmunity
Food and Art Revitalizing Markets Sustainably (F.A.R.M.S.) is our effort to bolster neighborhood food systems in a culturally savvy and financially self-sustaining way.
It fits our priorities of making money, cleaning up, and engaging youth — 90% of residents have a farming background, we utilized the overgrown lots that defined the neighborhood, and everybody eats.
F.A.R.M.S. is building a neighborhood food economy to include a production farm, farmers market, cottage kitchen, bulk pantry, eatery, folk art studio, and education. Many people who live here carry a rich but traumatizing agricultural history and a resolve to never return to the land. F.A.R.M.S. is how we affirm what we want, understand what we know, and reclaim what we have forgotten, together.
F.A.R.M.S.
We operate the Grenada Street Folk Garden, a resident-owned cooperative farm on 1.5 acres of formerly overgrown city-owned lots, designed as a food and folk art public space. It improves access to affordable healthy food while lowering food budgets and growing income through surplus sharing, jobs, and skills training. It celebrates African American folkways and homesteading traditions.
Upcoming Projects
IN THE WORKS
Check back soon for more information.
Building Skills
Acquire, Restore, Inspire, Sustain, Engage (A.R.I.S.E.) is our long-term strategy to protect from physical and cultural displacement while enlivening the neighborhood and building trade skills for all ages. It creates socio-economic infrastructure so residents can develop in place, practice collective ownership, and increase self-determination.
A.R.I.S.E.
What We’re Doing
Land Stewardship
(Owning Our Future)
To protect from external pressure, we purchased 65 vacant and abandoned properties in a contiguous eight-block area to hold as a community land trust. We seek to change not only the look of a blighted neighborhood, but to restore self-reliance, purpose, and vision. We use our hands to rebuild our buildings, our creativity to heal our spirits, and shared values to bring us together.
Worker Owners
Work is done by residents. Three Neighbor Labor crews handle demolition, construction, and maintenance. This leverages trade skills present here, promotes worker ownership, and creates economic on-ramps to the building trades.
Youth Apprentices
Our youth are our greatest hope. Our year-round apprenticeship prepares local youth to join Neighbor Labor crews and eventually lead operational, administrative, and creative functions across CO-OP NWJ.