Description

An Oakland Community Garden and Urban Agriculture Management Organization

Oakland’s blessing, and sometimes bottleneck, is its passionate, empowered and diverse social sector that results in some neighborhoods having 4+ community garden organizations, and others having none.  Meanwhile, Oakland has far fewer community gardens per capita than many major cities of its size.  We assembled a team to address this longstanding structural obstacle to increasing urban agriculture and food security in Oakland, CA.  We are exploring partnerships and business models for a Community Garden Management Organization that will be a pilot project to test the limits of what would be possible if one entity dealt with all the headaches of land ownership and asset management so that community members could get to the important work of strengthening the ties within the community by working together to create more urban agriculture and food security. Our goal is to launch a pilot project in collaboration with the existing urban agriculture organizations, public agencies, and philanthropy by the end of 2013.