Food

Do You Know Your Neighbors?

At the close of my first day working for Grassroots Grantmakers I found myself staring at a stack of books my supervisor, Janis, had left for me to read.  I thumbed through a couple of short packets in the...

Strawberry Pie and Community Gatherings

Our Ashland Gift Circle has a tradition of surprising people with amazing organic desserts. The evening before meeting there was a request for help washing windows, and the urge to make strawberry pie overtook me. Berries were gathered from...

The Peterson Garden Project

In 1942 Chicago led the nation in the Victory Garden Movement, which was a surprise to many because the city was the country’s second-largest urban area at the time and 90 percent of its citizens had never gardened before....

Growing Power ~ Will Allen

Former professional basketball player Will Allen is a leader in the food security and urban farming movement through his farm and not-for-profit, Growing Power. He and his organization have trained and inspired people in every corner of the US...

From Gangs to Gardens: How Community Agriculture Transformed Quesada Avenue

Flowers bloom alongside Quesada Avenue. Photo by Katherine Gustafson.   In 2002, two neighbors armed with spades and seeds changed everything for crime-addled Quesada Avenue in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point area. The street had been ground zero for the area’s drug trade...

The Institutional Assumption

The “institutional assumption” — for example, thinking in terms of medical care, clinics, insurance, outreach instead of health — is the most consistent failure in our thinking about change. If we start by looking at the condition we're interested in,...

Break Time Bakery

New City Neighbors of Grand Rapids, MI invented an engaging summer program for community youth: The Breaktime Bakery. Started in the summer of 2006, the bakery teaches 6th through 8th grade students basic job skills like showing up on time,...

Abundant Community: Local Food Alliance in Placer County, California

PlacerSustain is a 501(c)(3) non-profit located in Placer County, California, that stewards the creation of social capital at the grass roots level to create a sustainable future—helping people help themselves through sharing, connecting, collaborating and taking cooperative action.  PlacerSustain...

Community Abundance Is Its Gifts

Abundant communities start with making visible the gifts of everyone in the neighborhood—the families, the young people, the old people, the vulnerable people, the troublesome people. Everyone. We do this not out of altruism, but to create the elements...

Building Community with Portable Brick Ovens

“We knead to bake!” That’s the motto of the St. Paul Bread Club, “the largest bread club we know of,” they say, “at least in the sense of being a group of individuals with a common interest in bread.” The Club...

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Corporate Capture: Can We Find a Way Out?

This article, published originally by Nonprofit Quarterly, from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s summer 2024 issue, “Escaping Corporate Capture.” The aircraft manufacturer Boeing,...