New Green Era for Urban Growers Collective
Plus details of Chicago Chefs Cook for Tigray, a humanitarian fundraiser.
Urban Growers Collective Preps for New Green Era
I paid a recent visit to Urban Growers Collective’s South Chicago Farm to catch up with co-founder Laurell Sims. We discussed the Collective’s ongoing social impact programs and previewed the biggest project that it has ever been involved in: the Green Era Clean Energy Campus, which will launch this fall in Auburn Gresham, an under-resourced community on Chicago’s South Side.
Scroll down for my excerpted Q-and-A with Laurell, but first, please give your attention to the following information about an important, chef-driven fundraising dinner coming up on September 21.
Chicago Chefs Cook for Tigray on September 21
On March 17, just short weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a chef-driven coalition pulled off the remarkable feat of recruiting dozens of leading restaurants for Chicago Chefs Cook for Ukraine. The event raised more than $600,000 for the efforts by Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which had mobilized to provide millions of meals to Ukrainians displaced by the war.
Now, on Wednesday, September 21, the same organizers are producing another fundraiser to help victims of a humanitarian crisis in the war-torn Ethiopian province of Tigray. Chicago Chefs Cook for Tigray, which will raise money for disaster relief projects headed by HPN4Tigray, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization committed to improving access to health care and unmet humanitarian needs in the region. (HPN stands for Health Professionals Network.)
The event will take place from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, 3015 W. Division St. in Chicago.
The inspiration for the event is Tigist Reda, owner of Demera Ethiopian restaurant in Uptown and a Tigray native. Reda says a communications blackout has made it impossible for her to contact or inquire about the safety of her relatives, including her mother.
The core organizing team for the March Ukraine event — made up of chefs Tony Priolo of Chicago’s Piccolo Sogno and Chef Sarah Stegner of Prairie Grass Cafe in suburban Northbrook, plus Good Food advocates Darren Gest and Eda Davidman — is also taking the lead on the Tigray event, joined by Jodi Fyfe of The Paramount Group.
Click below to check out the astounding lineup of top chefs who are cooking for this event, and to buy your tickets priced at $150 per person.
A Giant Leap for Urban Farming Nears
Laurell Sims is a leader in Chicago’s urban agriculture and food equity communities. She co-founded the Urban Growers Collective non-profit with Erika Allen, with whom she previously worked at Growing Power Chicago. Both also are heavily engaged with Chicago Food Justice Action Council (CFPAC), which seeks to address food access, equity and sovereignty issues in the city’s under-resourced communities.
Urban Growers Collective manages its flagship farm in the South Chicago neighborhood; a small farm with artistic flair in Grant Park in downtown Chicago; and six other farms on the South and West sides. It sends out its Fresh Moves bus, a mobile produce stand that makes good food more available in communities that lack sufficient access. The Collective also collaborates with other organizations to provide direct food assistance to those in need, and provides jobs and job training opportunities for Chicago youth.
Now the organization’s leaders are at embarking on their biggest project ever, Green Era Clean Energy Campus, currently under development in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the South Side. The project centers on an anaerobic digester that will convert tons of food waste into compost to be used on urban farms while also producing renewable natural gas as an energy source. Urban Growers Collective will also move its flagship farm to a seven-acre space on the Green Era site.
I visited with Laurell at South Chicago Farm, and the following are excerpts from our conversation.
Q: My anecdotal experience going to farmers markets is that it's been a really good growing season. How's it been here?
A: It's been a really great season. Our farm team is excellent, so that's been really a joy…
Q: How much longevity is there with your growing team? Do you have a lot of the same people?
A: There’s really a huge, huge amount of longevity in our team. It has been really exciting to be able to kind of watch folks grow up with us, and really hone their skills and just become really amazing leaders in the food system. Many members in our Youth Corps become growers and also mentors to new team from Chicago.
Q: I was able to visit twice last year. Are you doing anything particularly different?
A: There's a couple shifts that we did this year. One is we've had an Incubator Farmer program for the last five years, and we really saw that there was a need to shift that. So programming changed into two different tracks. One is a growers’ apprenticeship, and one is an herbalism apprenticeship. The herbalism apprenticeship has become wildly popular… So we have 12 apprentices on that program. And then there’s our growers’ apprenticeship. We have eight apprentices, folks who were not ready to commit to a full incubator apprenticeship. They're not ready to dive in and become a business, but really want to build their foundation as growers, and then potentially become full-time farmers…
Q: When we talked last year, we were just starting to come out of COVID shutdowns and we had a lot about conversations about food insecurity and what you guys did to combat that during the height of the pandemic. Has that need diminished, or is it still ongoing?
A: It’s absolutely ongoing. Both June and July of this year, we've given out $24,000 for each month in $10 vouchers with our Fresh Moves Mobile Market. So the need is still incredibly high. We still have very long lines at each of our 14 stops for the mobile market. We've definitely not seen a decline with folks who are in need of those resources and who are coming out to take advantage of those free vouchers and also taking advantage of the LINK matching that we do through the Experimental Station (another Chicago nonprofit). We've definitely seen the need for food access has not diminished, especially given how much food prices have increased at grocery stores in the last year…
Q: Big changes are afoot for your organization with the upcoming launch of the Green Era project. What can we expect to see?
A: The anaerobic digester will be fully operational in the fall of 2022. And then we'll start fundraising for the educational campus and the new farm, which is about seven acres of new growing space for us and will allow us to just have a really dynamic educational center. That will also allow us to have culinary operations for Fresh Moves Mobile Market that we'll be able to operate out of that site. And it'll really allow us to have a dynamic space to have everything under one roof.
For the longest time, we’ve had office space in one location, a commissary where the bus operates out of in another location, and then eight different farms all over the South Side. With Green Era, we can at least operate as a hub and then deploy to the other farms from there. Just all of it together, and a really cool farm store where folks can come and get compost from the anaerobic digester, and also seedlings and plant starts and produce from the farm…
We'll be hiring even more staff as that project comes online, and then we’re really excited about being able to expand our adult job training opportunities and our youth job training opportunities to really meet that demand.
Q: What you've done to date is just remarkable, but this is a whole new dimension.
A: It's really exciting. I think it definitely closes the loop on everything that we're doing, and I think allows us to be able to really create the food system that we need for Chicago. The biggest barrier to creating a dynamic food system is the fact that there's not enough soil. To create enough compost for ourselves, but also to be able to sell it to gardeners and other urban farms across the city, it will expand urban farming…
I think we saw with the pandemic that we don't have enough food, we don't have enough folks growing food in Chicago and regionally. We need to create more farms in the city and have more folks growing food so that we have a food supply for anything that happens in the future. Because we are definitely woefully unprepared for anything that hits us…
Q: You've done wonders with this South Chicago Farm [located in a somewhat less densely populated corner of the South Side]. But Green Era, being in the center of a densely populated community, is really going to give job and educational opportunities to people who need them.
A: With Auburn Gresham, unemployment there has been so high, and the site was a vacant lot and brownfield for decades and such an eyesore in this neighborhood. So it’s great to be able to turn that around and to really make this such a beautiful destination. It’s bringing jobs and green space and beauty that is helping revitalize a park that has been underutilized for so long, it's just really bringing life back to an area that hasn't had life for decades.
Q: I understand that part of the hiring will provide job opportunities for ex-offenders and other people with employability problems.
A: Yes, the new greenhouse will help provide those jobs and job training opportunities. We'll really be expanding that program and working with partners like Growing Home to be able to provide some of that job training. [Growing Home is an urban farming nonprofit in the South Side community of West Englewood that for years has provided farm and job training for ex-offenders and others.]…
We're really excited about being able to do partnerships like that instead of reinventing the wheel, using the breadth of both organizations’ expertise and creating really incredible programming.