Urban Roots, MI
Jenna Weiler
Urban Roots was originally formed in 2013 as an LLC by Levi Gardner to better understand the potential of urban agriculture as a transformational tool in Grand Rapids. During those first two years, he visited numerous urban farms, social enterprise organizations, and other holistic centers for social, ecological, and community empowerment throughout the country.
Experiencing urban farms on the South side of Chicago, to sitting in on a talk by Father Greg Boyle discussing kinship, to spending one month learning about Permaculture in Nicaragua, convinced Levi that these models could work in the Grand Rapids urban context.
In 2015, following two years of urban farming and teaching throughout the city of Grand Rapids, Levi and his team were privileged to move into the Madison neighborhood to begin work there.
This neighborhood is one of the most devastated, yet also rich in culture. There they began the true process of learning how to be part of the neighborhood and city.
Today they are wholly committed to the idea of building a regenerative organizational model that fostered empowerment over charity, stewardship over dominance, and community over privatization. They have remained committed to the idea that cultivation, which is, stewarding that which already exists, is far more powerful than construction, which is, imposing a set of ideas onto an already functioning system.
Their greatest teacher continues to be the forest, wherein highly diverse species not only cohabitant, but actually thrive on the diversity.
Not only do they grow food, but more importantly, they engage in the fundamental act of what it means to be a human being.
They believe that through honest and rich collaborations in neighborhoods and cities, urban agriculture has the power to provide healthy food access, experiential pedagogy, economic development, ecological stewardship, community revitalization, and social empowerment.
