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QUestion 1:

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http://anvfarm.org/

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Acta Non Verba - Youth Urban Farm Project - Oakland, CA

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Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) elevates life in the inner city by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming.

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http://anvfarm.org/

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Acta Non Verba - Youth Urban Farm Project - Oakland, CA

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Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) elevates life in the inner city by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming.

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Project 8 - Washington D.C. Youth Garden

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Project 8 - Washington D.C. Youth Garden

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http://www.washingtonyouthgarden.org/green-ambassadors-program/

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Our Green Ambassadors Program centers around a 6-week summer high school internship located at the demonstration garden at the US National Arboretum. Interns learn how to garden, prepare and eat healthy produce, visit and learn about other green organizations and the jobs they offer, lead student garden field trips, participate in structured communication skills training, and experience an incredible, outdoor summer.

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Project 7 - Urban Youth Apprenticeships in Minneapolis

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Project 7 - Urban Youth Apprenticeships in Minneapolis

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http://www.thelinemedia.com/features/youthurbanfarming01202015.aspx

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Come January and February, winter's doldrums are lessened-at least for Twin Cities' urban gardeners and farmers-by the arrival of seed catalogs. Poring through pages with images of and information on a cornucopia of vegetables, flowering plants and even gardening tools can quicken excitement for spring. The youth at Urban Roots on St. Paul's East Side are no exception. "This week the kids started planning the gardens," says Rebecca Mino, manager of Urban Roots' Cooking & Wellness Program, "and are excited about another year of planting, harvesting and selling what they grow."

Urban Roots has been gardening with East Side high-school students since 1996, hiring them as interns for an array of positions. The youngest are 14, and they can work until the summer after high-school graduation. In the Market Garden Program, they work in seven vegetable gardens, run a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, and operate a farmers market stand.

They sell produce to local restaurants and salads at the "Roots for the Home Team" stand at Target Field during ball games. They also teach cooking and nutrition classes to other youth and families through Urban Roots' Cooking & Wellness Program. The goal of these programs is to cultivate good health on the East Side by growing fresh food, leadership skills and economic independence through urban farming and other networking and educational opportunities-seeding such community development initiatives by focusing on youth.

"Before I came to Urban Roots, I ate junk food. I hadn't even heard of kale or chard, and I hadn't ever tasted a radish," says one former intern, who remains an avid gardener. She's also majoring in English literature and communications in college, as the Urban Roots' experience cultivated her confidence with writing, public speaking and interacting with reporters.

"My family cooks traditional Hmong dishes, but now I pass along to them what I learned," she adds. "It's fun to cook for them and introduce new vegetables and whole grains. I tell my friends that this isn't about eating just salads. There are so many different kinds of healthy foods and delicious ways to prepare them."

The greater community benefits from Urban Roots' youth programs, as well. Besides the nearly 4,000 pounds of fresh produce interns deliver each growing season (including food shelf contributions), nearly 1,500 East Side residents learn about cooking, nutrition, gardening and environmental conservation. For a neighborhood described as a "food desert"-meaning fresh produce is difficult to find, much less purchase at reasonable cost-that's no small feat.

Gardening: wealth building and leadership opportunities

In 2010, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Minnesota and Amherst A. Wilder Foundation released a study titled "The Unequal Distribution of Health in the Twin Cities." The study asked: "Is there a connection between socioeconomic status and health in the Twin Cities?" The answer is "Yes." The study found that "here as elsewhere health is strongly connected to race, income, and the specific parts of the metro area in which people live."

According to the study, areas within the Twin Cities where people experience the most ill health and shortest life expectancies are also the poorest economically. Those neighborhoods include North Minneapolis, and Phillips and Powderhorn in Minneapolis. In St. Paul, the study pointed to the Frogtown and West Seventh neighborhoods, as well as Payne-Phalen and Dayton's Bluff on the East Side.

Urban Roots is just one of many community development organizations that is working to improve residents' quality of life by integrating urban gardening with wealth building. Frogtown Farm is another initiative. A vision of longtime Frogtown residents, the urban farm and park is currently in its development phase, but intends to become "a hub for a healthy food system that fills gaps in food production, storage, manufacturing, and distribution," according to the website.

Then there's the East Side Healthy Foods Initiative, which will help Market on the Bluff in the Dayton's Bluff neighborhood-which last year transitioned into becoming vendor-owned and -operated-hit the road this summer as a traveling market.

Urban farmer Timothy Page, who co-owns Holistic Health Farms, and Page and Flowers in St. Paul, is the former manager of Market on the Bluff. Through his companies, Page and his partner Cherry Flowers provide local food systems expertise, edible landscape planning, garden program coordination and implementation, and education to other community organizations. They also grow and market produce.

Last year, Page decided to share his insights on budgeting, sales and marketing, and customer relations with other Market on the Bluff vendors, in order to facilitate the vendors' collaborative efforts to run the market themselves. As a result, Page says, Market on the Bluff has become not only a wealth building and leadership opportunity for the vendors. The market has also become a community-gathering place.

"Parents set up play dates for their kids at the market," Page says. "People share recipes. The vendors have stopped competing with each other. Instead, they're sharing insights on how to be more successful at marketing and selling their produce and products."

Page and Flowers have also shared their expertise with the youth at Boys Totem Town, a residential program for adolescent boys who have been adjudicated delinquent by the Ramsey County's Juvenile Court. In addition to helping the boys plant a vegetable garden and market the produce, Page says, "We talk with them about the importance of eating healthy food, the value of urban farming, and transferable skills: why it's better to sell veggies than drugs."

"Through gardening, we teach them to lead themselves and make their own and better decisions," Page adds.

Cultivating the next generation of food producers

In North Minneapolis, says DeVon Nolen, manager of the West Broadway Farmers Market, the Blue Cross Blue Shield/Wilder findings inspired numerous community initiatives. "What came out of the study was that we do not have enough access to fresh local food," she says, "but if we did have access, we would consume it!"

The community launched Wholesome Ways in coordination with Blue Cross Blue Shield and NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center -a fruit and vegetable prescription program for households in which a member is diabetic. Each week, the household received a prescription they could redeem for up to $35 in produce at West Broadway Farmers Market. "This program drove more even consumers and revenue to our market vendors," Nolen says.

Last year, 60 percent of the market's vendors were Northside growers. Because the market is a project of the West Broadway Business Coalition, vendors and other local food entrepreneurs receive technical assistance, and information on licensing and insurance, promotion and marketing-in order to develop their self sufficiency.

Reaching out to youth was also imperative. Project Sweetie Pie, a program that encourages young people to become food producers, and the family program Appetite for Change, inspired two 16-year-old residents to participate in the Minneapolis Healthy Corner Store Program to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to small businesses in their neighborhoods via BrightSide Distribution.

"People rely heavily on corner stores for food," Nolen explains, "but it's not always cost effective for those stores to carry fresh produce. Demand isn't heavy enough and thus the prices are high. So these kids worked with BrightSide to bring in bulk produce, and distributed portions to each grocery store so it was economically viable without a lot of waste."

Those kids are now part of her "secession plan," Nolen says, "the next generation of organizers and leaders around food justice; understanding the correlation between income and mortality, increased healthy food access and health outcomes; and how food initiatives foster economic independence."

Becoming agents of change

At Hope Community in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis, a series of community listening sessions focused on challenges people experience when trying to get healthy food, and how they experience food in relationship to health, community and family. Those sessions resulted in a partnership with the Land Stewardship Project to create a variety of programs including a community garden, a youth program for growing and preparing healthy food and developing leadership, and cooking opportunities for residents to share knowledge and recipes.

The sessions also produced a leadership team, which is plotting next steps in the neighborhood's development from "food desert" to resource for fresh, sustainable produce. "At Hope we work from the core belief that peoples' connections with each other are an important underpinning of a healthy stable resilient existence," says Betsy Sohn, an organizer and program manager. "We're growing our capacity to do this work by partnering with other local organizations to create supportive environments in which people can feel good about eating fresh healthy food."

One of Hope's initiatives is the Youth Stewards Program. Participants work in the community garden, harvest and sell their produce, lead cooking demonstrations, and learn about food within the context of the greater urban environment. During a harvest gathering last fall, Sohn says, youth from the program "had so much to say, about how they loved digging in the dirt, even though at first they thought it would be icky and wormy; how they loved meeting people different from them and discovering what they had in common."

"It's important that we create opportunities for young people, at an early age, to be outside and thinking about what they can do to stay healthy," she continues. "At one of our listening sessions, one of the youth said: 'When you're a teenager and go to a store with junk food, you just can't stop eating it...it's like it's a part of you.' So as a community we need to help each other stay healthy, and let youth and families know they don't have to accept what's happening in the world. They can be agents of change."

This story is part of a series on community transformation underwritten by Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Twin Cities, an organization dedicated to helping community residents transform distressed neighborhoods into healthy and sustainable communities of choice and opportunity.

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Cultivating Youth As Agents of Change Through Urban Agriculture

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Come January and February, winter's doldrums are lessened-at least for Twin Cities' urban gardeners and farmers-by the arrival of seed catalogs. Poring through pages with images of and information on a cornucopia of vegetables, flowering plants and even gardening tools can quicken excitement for spring. The youth at Urban Roots on St.

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Project 6 - Compost pick up and youth employment NYC

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Project 6 - Compost pick up and youth employment NYC

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http://bushwickdaily.com/bushwick/categories/news/1557-bkrot-makes-composting-easy-supports-bushwicks-urban-farms

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Courtesy of BK Rot

As good Brooklynites, we here at Bushwick Daily are familiar with the virtues of composting our food scraps. Composting is an essential part of sustainable agriculture, turning organic waste into a fertilizer that returns the nutrients locked up in our food scraps back to the farm. But who wants to put up with the hassle of schlepping their stinking food scraps baggie to the Union Square Greenmarket (much less the resentful glares of their fellow L train passengers)? To the eco-conscious urbanite, recycling food waste sounds nice in theory, but is it worth enduring its inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant realities?

Fortunately for us here in Bushwick, BKROT has come to relieve us of this dilemma. This new initiative, which officially launched earlier this month, aims to make food waste recycling convenient and affordable for Bushwick residents, while also supporting local urban farms and providing green employment opportunities for neighborhood youth. For $10 a month, BKROT will come to your apartment building once a week to pick up your food scraps. The service includes a supply of compost bags, and for $5 you can buy a neat little compost bin that fits the bags and keeps any foul odors from escaping. BKROT's compost couriers, who travel carbon-free by bicycle, are Bushwick youth recruited through Bushwick Campus Farm's summer youth employment program. They are trained in bicycle safety and composting practices and paid $15 an hour for their weekly four-hour shifts. The youth sort through the collected food scraps (they're earning that $15 an hour!) to remove any non-compostable items (for example, any meat or dairy products) and deposit them at compost bins throughout the neighborhood. BKROT plans to donate the finished compost to urban farms in the neighborhood, helping foster a greener, more sustainable Bushwick.

Sandra Nurse founded BKROT along with her partner, Zachary Miller. Nurse, who is a carpenter, discovered the joys of cycling on her way to various jobs around town and thought, if you can haul carpentry gear on a bike, why not food waste? A weekly collection service would eliminate many of the inconveniences that keep people from composting. Better yet, hiring neighborhood youth would address youth unemployment and provide an educational opportunity doing important work to boost Bushwick's environmental sustainability. With key assistance from the Bushwick Eco Action Network (BEAN), Nurse and Miller turned their idea into a reality now 17 composting households strong.

For more information about BKROT and to sign up for their food waste collection service, check out bkrot.org.

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BKROT Makes Composting Easy, Supports Bushwick's Urban Farms

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As good Brooklynites, we here at Bushwick Daily are familiar with the virtues of composting our food scraps. Composting is an essential part of sustainable agriculture, turning organic waste into a fertilizer that returns the nutrients locked up in our food scraps back to the farm.

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http://www.seattletilth.org/sygw

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Tilth Alliance Youth Garden Works - Tilth Alliance

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Find out about our farm-to-market employment training program for underserved youth ages 16-21.

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http://www.sustainableamerica.org/blog/ron-finleys-guerilla-gardens/

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Ron Finley wants everyone to understand "growing your own food is like printing your own money." The group he co-founded is LA Green Grounds. Their mission: "Growing, working, teaching: changing turf into edible gardens in South Los Angeles."

After giving a rousing 10-minute TED talk about his urban gardening efforts in last winter, Finley found himself shaking hands with the likes of Google's Sergey Brin and being hugged by Goldie Hawn. For a man who juggles jobs as a fitness trainer and fashion designer to float his unpaid gardening passion the attention was overwhelming, and he is determined to not let it get to his head. As he recently told the New York Times, "All the attention in the world won't do my dishes."

Finey lives in a food desert dominated by fast food chains and void of places to buy fresh food. He decided to plant vegetables in the median strip between his house and the street to avoid the 45-minute drive to Whole Foods. When the city of Los Angeles tried to cite him for not having the proper $400 permit, he rounded up a group of activists and headed to the city council who eventually got the city to back off.

Then, when Finley saw a mother and daughter taking vegetables from his median strip garden late one night, he realized the freedom gained from growing food was something he needed to share with others in his community. Today he sponsors community "dig-ins" where volunteers gather together and plant gardens on abandoned city lots. With the advent of his TED-inspired fame, volunteers are now much easier to come by. Here's his TED talk:

As you can see, Finley is not one to take anything lying down. Everything he does is imbued with a natural spunk that has won him widespread notoriety in his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. He fervently believes that gardening is the solution to urban problems as diverse as health issues, gang violence, and poverty. As he told the audience at TED, "if you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta."

Ron Finley is not the first or the only gardener to be cited for planting vegetables streetside. In December, we wrote about about several people who have had the shocking realization that in certain public and publicly visible spaces, like your own front yard, it is illegal to grow food. Some activists have taken to creating food forests, turning public city spaces into a forests of food free for the taking. (It's a good idea to check your city ordinances before you plant a big garden in a public space, and if you find out that your local laws are too restrictive or outdated, we recommend lobbying to have them changed rather than breaking them.)

Resilient food systems are an important part of our sustainable future. By localizing food production, whether through organized urban farms or volunteer community efforts like LA Green Grounds, we can secure better access to fresh, healthy food and reduce the amount of fuel it takes to produce it.

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Ron Finley wants everyone to understand "growing your own food is like printing your own money." The group he co-founded is LA Green Grounds. Their mission: "Growing, working, teaching: changing turf into edible gardens in South Los Angeles."

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http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/raised-in-chicago-west-side-urban-farm-reaps-aquaponics-harvest/

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It's 10:30 on a sunny morning in West Humboldt Park and time for Benjamin Kant to feed his fish. The 30-year-old entrepreneur scoops a bucket full of pellets and steps up to a five-foot tall blue tank teeming with hundreds of tilapia.

Kant raises the bucket over the open tank and fish surge to the top to gobble up the chunks of reconstituted sea protein as soon as the pellets hit the water. He grins as the feeding frenzy roils to the surface and sprays water in his direction. For the founder and CEO of Metropolitan Farms, dodging the backsplash from hungry tilapia comes with the territory of aquaponics-an agriculture system where urban farmers raise plants and fish together under the same roof.

Metro Farms opened in October, one of the newest additions to Chicago's urban agriculture scene. The business at 4250 W. Chicago Ave. sits on a 33,000 square foot plot that formerly served as a parking lot for the Becker Dairy's fleet of delivery trucks.

There, Kant and his business partner Shockey Funke built a greenhouse that sustains crops of lettuce, kale and about a dozen herbs, in addition to Rocky Mountain and American Blue tilapia that live in six 800-gallon tanks.

Metro Farms sends a weekly harvest to farmers markets, local food co-ops, and specialty grocery stores such as Angelo Caputo's Fresh Markets.

It's all part of what Kant calls a "biological machine," and it stands as a testament to the potential of aquaponics to become a major part of urban agriculture in Chicago and other cities with unused industrial or commercial space.

Combining techniques

Urban farmers have long used hydroponics-growing plants in a nutrient solution without soil-to produce crops in unconventional settings such as garages, basements and warehouses. Aquaponics adds aquaculture-fish farming-to the process.

In a typical aquaponics system, fish waste is captured from tanks, broken down into nitrates by naturally occurring bacteria, and channeled as a source of fertilizer for plants growing in special beds connected to the fish environment. The plants, in turn, filter and oxygenate the water, which is then pumped back into the fish tanks. The process runs continuously, forming an energy-efficient system that puts waste to productive use.

Because aquaponics doesn't require soil and nutrients from the ground, it can be practiced just about anywhere there is space, indoors or out, for fish tanks and planting beds. At Metropolitan Farms, Kant and Funke turned a neglected concrete patch along the Chicago Avenue industrial corridor into a working farm that produces greens and fish year round in a greenhouse.

"With aquaponics we create an ecosystem," said Kant. "It fits into nooks and crannies, and there is a lot of room for technological innovation."

Flexible space requirements make aquaponics uniquely suited to urban settings, and bring several environmental benefits as well. According to the Aquaponics Association, this type of farming uses just a fraction of the water required for soil agriculture-about 10 percent, depending on the type of crops and climate.

In cities, aquaponics farming cuts down on transportation energy by bringing the players closer together. With producers, consumers, utilities and distributors in a tighter radius, less fuel is used for food delivery.

What's good for the environment is also good for the bottom line. By operating close to customers, Metro Farms doesn't have to spend as much to bring its products to market.

"Aquaponics is extremely capital intensive, but we're cutting out the middleman and distributing directly to our buyers," said Kant.

Once farmers make capital expenditures to get up and running, the system becomes largely self-sustaining because aquaponics doesn't use chemicals or fertilizer and fish waste is recycled.

Repurposing waste as part of food production makes aquaponics a uniquely sustainable farming method, and it is the focus of another innovative urban farming center: The Plant Chicago.

Closing the loop

"Businesses here produce waste, but that can fuel another farm on the site," explained Kassandra Hinrichsen, Plant Chicago's education and outreach manager.

She leads a Saturday afternoon tour through the Back-of-the-Yards building, pointing out to visitors all the ways that food producers located within the erstwhile meatpacking plant make use of what would normally be unwanted refuse.

Whiner Beer, a brewery on the second floor, pumps spent grain into an anaerobic digester, which converts the sludge into biogas for an electricity-generating turbine.

Fruiting Mushrooms recycles sawdust and coffee chaff to create a growing medium a Blue Oyster variety that adds a touch of sweetness to recipes at Logan Square's Lula Café.

And algae from a shrimp farm gets processed into food for the fish in the aquaponics tanks.

The Plant's tenants produce vastly different food products, but they all have the same attitude toward waste. To paraphrase an old saying, one company's trash is another company's treasure.

John Edel founded Plant Chicago, the non-profit organization that manages the space at 1400 W. 46th St., in 2011. His previous ventures included redeveloping old buildings like the former meat packing facility transformed into The Plant. The group mission there is to develop new food production techniques that reduce waste, conserve energy, and make urban communities healthy and self-sufficient, said Hinrichsen.

To that end, Edel's company Bubbly Dynamics LLC purchased The Plant's Southwest Side home from Peer Foods, which until 2007 had used it to process pork. The building is now a laboratory of sorts, dedicated to creating "circular economies" of food production. In such a system, byproducts generated by one producer are captured and used by another, creating a closed loop cycle that, ideally, generates zero net waste.

At The Plant, finding ways to close waste loops is an obsession that extends beyond the food producers to the building itself. One highlight of public tours is a bank of meat coolers that are being converted into bathrooms and showers for the building's workers.

Potential for farmers and communities

Metro Farms and The Plant demonstrate the how urban agriculture, especially aquaponics, can transform neglected or defunct sites into productive spaces run by local residents.

One key advantage is "the ability to make use of the small, unused, and sometimes unusable areas present in many urban environments," noted Eric Weber, The Plant's farm technology coordinator, in an email. "Everything from abandoned buildings or lots to building rooftops to individuals' yards that would be otherwise growing grass."

Instead, people can turn those kinds of places into productive mini-farms.

"The scalability in this sense is infinite, as you're only limited by the number of these types of spaces available," Weber noted.

Aquaponics farming, in particular, can be done by commercially-focused, large-scale growers like Metro Farms, or backyard garden enthusiasts like Dave Johnson of Villa Park.

Johnson, whose professional background is in construction, had no experience with gardening or farming aside from the few herbs he grew on a window sill. One night, while eating Tilapia for dinner, Johnson wondered if he could raise his own, since they are among the most commonly farmed fish.

Soon he was looking up aquaponics farming techniques on hobby websites and watching tutorials on YouTube. His garage became a greenhouse, complete with a 200-gallon fish environment consisting of a breeding tank and two nursery tanks.

Those fish help support an impressive variety of plants, from typical crops of lettuce and strawberries to the more unconventional dwarf oranges and lemon cucumbers.

"When you start researching, you find so many things you never even heard of," said Johnson. "You can find plants to grow that you can't find here [in Illinois] normally."

Just like the Metro Farms greenhouse, Johnson's garage set up runs all year long, so fresh produce and fish are always just steps away from the kitchen.

Johnson and his girlfriend went to The Plant's Saturday afternoon tour to see what a larger aquaponics farm looks like and to glean some technical knowledge in case they ever want to produce larger quantities for sale.

"Right now it's just for us," he said. "But we can use the surplus in a farmers market, and we might scale up in the future."

According to Weber, that kind of individual-level farming benefits local communities by fostering social cohesion and connecting food producers to their customers in ways that aren't possible with large-scale rural farming.

"You could call it 'citizen farmer,' versus the large farms that exist outside of populated areas being operated by people you wouldn't be likely to meet at the corner store," said Weber. "Bringing the community more in touch with how the food they eat is grown is the driver behind ... urban farming."

Growing a business

Patience with bureaucracy and tolerance of failure are virtues for Chicago's would-be urban farmers who want to move beyond the hobby stage to commercial production.

One stumbling block is the city's distinction between community gardens and urban farms. Once an operation begins to sell its produce, it moves into the urban farm category and has to satisfy a host of zoning, permitting, and licensing requirements.

These regulatory hurdles, when added to startup costs, may hinder small-scale entrepreneurs without the business acumen or capital investment of an operation like Metro Farms. "We will probably see much slower growth in the commercial sector, simply due to the amount of capital required, and the convoluted maze of red tape that must be tackled currently," said Weber.

Kant recalls having an empty site leased for eight months while he waited for the city to approve the zoning and building permits he needed to build the Metro Farms greenhouse. Once construction got a green light, there were other routine delays-meetings with baffled insurers, repeated city inspections-and freak accidents-a driver jumped the Chicago avenue sidewalk and smashed his car through the greenhouse wall, nearly rupturing a plant bed and draining the entire system.

On top of that, it took almost seven months for the Metro Farms bio system to come on line with the right balance of fertilizer and nutrients.

"It was a brutal process," Kant said.

To build the complex system, Kant and Funke enlisted the help of Nelson Pade Inc., a Monticello, Wisconsin-based specialist that provides project planning, pre-fabricated systems, and grower support for home and commercial aquaponics farmers. In its current configuration, the 10,000-square foot Metro Farms greenhouse comprises three separate bays constructed of twin-wall polycarbonate. Two of the bays are dedicated to plant production and the third houses fish tanks, a packing operation and a storage cooler.

Now that it has successfully passed through a hazardous two-year startup phase, Metro Farms is focusing efforts on growth, both agricultural and financial. Kant hatched the idea for his farm while earning an MBA at UIC and is eager to show that aquaponics is a viable-and profitable-subset of urban agriculture.

"We are doing well, making money every week," said Kant. "We'll hit our stride in about a year. We're trying to innovate our business model and find the right types of production and choice of crops."

With a recent Certified Naturally Grown designation and a system capable of producing crops such as 80 pounds of basil per week, Metro Farms is already in the vanguard of Chicago's urban farms.

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Raised in Chicago: West Side urban farm reaps aquaponics harvest

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It's 10:30 on a sunny morning in West Humboldt Park and time for Benjamin Kant to feed his fish. The 30-year-old entrepreneur scoops a bucket full of pellets and steps up to a five-foot tall blue tank teeming with hundreds of tilapia.

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Video 1:
https://vimeo.com/167327324

http://www.fixdevelopment.com/projects/commons/

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To view a gallery of images, scroll down to the bottom of this page.
Walnut Way's The Innovations and Wellness Commons, aka, The Commons, is a current project of Fix Development. Fix serves as co-developer providing guidance for project decisions involving funding, financing, design, tenant recruitment, construction and property start-up for this catalytic development project.

Phase I construction was completed with tenant occupancy occurring in Fall 2015. Phase II is now under development.

Background

The Commons traces its origins to the Lindsay Height Quality of Life Plan, a 4- year inclusive community planning process to improve neighborhood social, economic and physical conditions, funded by the Zilber Family Foundation in 2008.

Development of the plan was led by Walnut Way Conservation Corp. a 501c3 organization committed to sustaining an economically diverse and abundant community through civic engagement, environmental stewardship, and by creating venues for prosperity. Chartered by neighbors in 2000, Walnut Way challenges the cycle of poverty in the Lindsay Heights neighborhood by engaging, educating, and employing residents to take leadership roles in revitalizing their community.

Located in a Milwaukee central city area bounded by N. 8th Street to N. 20th Street and W. Locust Street to W. Walnut Street, Lindsay Heights is home to a population comprised of 99% African American and Latino residents, 52.9% of whom live below the poverty line, a statistic that is more than double the average for Milwaukee as a whole. The foreclosure rate in the area has reached crisis level with more than half of the commercial properties currently standing vacant and many homes blighted from absentee ownership.

Yet, since its purposeful beginnings, residents and partners have worked together with Walnut Way to successfully:

Drive out crime and create a close-knit neighborhood of caring residents

Build a vibrant community center from a formerly dilapidated drug house

Restore century-old homes and help construct new owner-occupied homes

Transform 12 vacant city lots into productive gardens and fruit orchards

Install 40 rain gardens and rainwater cisterns

Offer programs for all ages that promote health and wellness, art and culture, and education and training.

The Commons represents Walnut Way's next step forward in efforts to promote the neighborhood's transformation as reflected in the Quality of Life Plan.

The Project

The Walnut Way community's vision of "health and wellness" includes physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, occupational, financial, and environmental aspects of wellbeing and they have declared themselves ready to make healthy choices easy choices. To that end, they set three major goals for The Commons:

Social and Cultural Impact:

Create sustainable programs, products and services of restoration and healing, providing access in which individual wellbeing and neighborhood quality of life are cultivated.

Nurture and enhance connections among neighbors, organizations and valuable resources to improve individual health and quality of life, and strengthen a neighborhood culture of wellness.

Economic Impact:

Deepen shared investment in the neighborhood through a comprehensive economic strategy for enterprise development, leading to the creation of job training and employment opportunities for residents.

Design and position worker- owned businesses by leveraging the programs and financial resources of the Commons' anchor institutions.

Environmental Impact:

Build a beautiful, environmentally sustainable campus that will be a catalyst in restoring vitality to the North Avenue commercial corridor.

Expand the Walnut Way campus of gardens and neighborhood environmental center, to a commercial location.

Engage the best ecological practices in architecture design and structure for this commercial facility

Incorporate craftsmanship in preservation and the use of sustainable materials

Provides shared space for community gatherings and environmental education.

Those are goals that align with Fix Development's development definitions and quadruple bottom line goals.

Prospective Tenants

The Commons project site, located at 1609-1615 W. North Avenue, includes a vacant lot and an existing building. The development will rehabilitate the historic building (Phase I) and construct a new adjacent building (Phase II) that will form a hub for health and wellness services, economic development, educational and training programs and neighborhood organizing efforts in Lindsay Heights.

This hub of activities will emerge through integrated programs and services provided by a cadre of tenants. Fix Development has helped facilitate the discussions leading to Letters of Intent that will form the basis for eventual lease agreements with nine prospective tenants. Together they represent 100% occupancy of the anticipated 20,000 square feet building and potentially 35 new jobs. Those organizations and businesses include:

Outpost Natural Foods, a locally-owned co-op grocery store chain the provides quality organic and locally produced foods, products and educational supports that promote personal and environmental health and meet the access needs of their owners and customers for healthy eating and living well.

The Juice Kitchen, an entrepreneurial local business featuring completely vegan raw juice and vegetarian food bar advancing the goal of providing healthy, tasty, affordable food and healthy eating education for Milwaukee central city residents.

Jobs Work/The Milwaukee Community Business Collaborative, Inc. (MCBC), an employment organization focused on creating job opportunities for chronically unemployed individuals who are motivated to change their circumstances by supporting the development and growth of successful for-profit businesses within Milwaukee's central city neighborhoods.

Aurora Health Care-Integrative Medicine Group, an evidenced-based combination of modern or conventional medicine with holistic medicine to help people on their journey to health and wellness. They will offer acupuncture services at The Commons.

Milwaukee Center for Independence, an established, Milwaukee-based organization that will open a commercial kitchen offering on the job training at the Commons. The MCFI Hospitality Academy provides on-the-job training for individuals with special needs and other barriers to success who are interested in working in the hospitality industry.

Independent Wellness Services A suite of dedicated spaces, master-leased by Walnut Way for subleasing to independent wellness practitioners for the provision of services such as reiki, massage, nutrition and other wellness services, complementing acupuncture provided by Aurora Health Care and providing access to a full continuum of holistic care. These spaces are also designed to enable local wellness entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their business and client base.

Walnut Way Conservation Corp. will maintain offices in the building for some administrative and program staff and will include general assembly space that will be available for use by other tenants and the general public.

Photo Gallery

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To view a gallery of images, scroll down to the bottom of this page. Walnut Way's The Innovations and Wellness Commons, aka, The Commons, is a current project of Fix Development. Fix serves as co-developer providing guidance for project decisions involving funding, financing, design, tenant recruitment, construction and property start-up for this catalytic development project.

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Website:
http://www.tkwa.com/growing-power-vertical-farm/
Article:
http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/blog/real_estate/2010/11/growing-power-growing-in-milwaukee.html?surround=etf&ana=e_article

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(Enable JavaScript in your browser to view additional project images.)

Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Size: 27,000 square feet
Status: In Progress
Program: Highly sustainable urban five-story vertical farm including greenhouses, conference/training and retail spaces

Growing Power, Inc. is an internationally-recognized non-profit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environment in which they live by helping to provide equal access to healthy, high-quality, safe and affordable food. This mission is implemented by providing hands-on training, on-the-ground demonstration, outreach, and technical assistance through the development of Community Food Systems that help people grow, process, market and distribute food in a sustainable manner.

Growing Power currently operates six greenhouses on a historic two-acre site that is the last remaining farm and greenhouse operation within the City of Milwaukee. As the organization has expanded, the need for additional space to support production, classes, meetings, meal preparation, offices, and on-site warehousing has grown exponentially. Growing Power and TKWA have worked together to develop plans for an ambitious new facility, the world's first working urban Vertical Farm.

Five stories of south-facing greenhouse areas will allow production of plants, vegetables, and herbs year-round. Expanded educational classrooms, conference spaces, a demonstration kitchen, food processing and storage, freezers, and loading docks will further support Growing Power's expanding mission as a local and national resource for learning about sustainable urban food production.

Growing Power was founded by Will Allen, one of the world's leading authorities in the expanding field of urban agriculture. In 2008 he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and he is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. In May, 2010 Time Magazine named him one of the Time 100 World's Most Influential People.

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Growing Power, Inc. is an internationally-recognized non-profit organization and land trust supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environment

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Project 1 - Greenhouses over demolished homes 

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Project 1 - Greenhouses over demolished homes 

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-greenhouse-effect/501143/

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When Steven Mankouche first saw the house at 3347 Burnside Street in Detroit, in 2013, it was buckling and scarred with burn marks 1. An artist named Andy Malone, who lived nearby, had just purchased the lot for $500 and was hoping to find some way to bring it back to life. Mankouche, an architect, and his partner, Abigail Murray, a ceramicist 2, floated a proposal to do just that, by commandeering the house's foundation and repurposing it as a sort of plant nursery.

The following year, a team set to work dismantling the empty house, and in 2015, a new frame went up 3. By the time I visited, in June of this year, a new exterior had taken shape, with a fluted-plastic roof and wood siding. Like the old walls, the siding was charred, but deliberately so, via shou sugi ban, a Japanese technique that singes wood to render it resistant to rot. Despite summer's heat and humidity, the interior of the structure was temperate. Come winter, Mankouche told me, "it will be hot enough for plants, but not for people."

That's fitting, because the structure's future inhabitants will include species that can't usually weather Michigan winters, like fig trees 4 [see 7 ]. With the help of his design collaborative, archolab, Mankouche-a professor at the University of Michigan-is building a sunken greenhouse he calls Afterhouse 5, which he hopes will serve as a prototype for other projects across the city and beyond.

Two years after Detroit emerged from bankruptcy, its urban-farming scene is flourishing, with some 1,400 farms and community gardens spread across the city's 139 square miles. Many local growers worry that they will be uprooted as the city woos development projects, and with them, much-needed taxes and jobs. But green spaces don't have to be at odds with revitalization, says Maurice Cox, the city's director of planning and development, who notes that farms and gardens are a key element of the Detroit Future City plan, a blueprint for diversifying local land use.

In some parts of the city, farms span entire blocks, conjuring an urban prairie. Afterhouse's neighborhood, by contrast, remains densely populated. Rather than plunk down a building that was discordant, or turn the land into a meadow, Mankouche wanted a structure whose scale and shape would evoke the bungalow that was once there 6. "It doesn't have this kind of massive, spaceship-like landing of something of a completely different scale," he says.

With the help of local masons, Mankouche, Murray, and Malone preserved the house's foundation, fortifying it with steel rebar 7. The team also recovered materials from demolition sites, enlisting an artisan at the ceramics studio Pewabic Pottery to concoct black, white, and blue glazes for salvaged bricks 8. The colors were selected with an eye toward modulating temperature: Due to the roof's angle and the structure's orientation, the sun will strike the black bricks only in winter, when the greenhouse needs extra heat. This and other passive-design elements are meant to keep the building insulated year-round. A neighbor-Kate Daughdrill, who runs Burnside Farm on the lot next door-will use the structure to extend her growing season.

Through an ongoing blight-eradication campaign, Detroit plans to raze 5,000 vandalized or dilapidated homes this year. Going forward, Afterhouse's design could offer an alternative to full demolitions, which typically cost more than $12,000. (Demolition expenses include dismantling each foundation, treating lots for contaminants such as lead and asbestos, and hauling in fresh dirt and topsoil to stabilize the land.) Mankouche hopes that eventually, building foundations will be repurposed for uses beyond horticulture-for example, as skate parks, or pools, or root cellars. "There's so much investment in these structures already," he told me. "Concrete, human labor, plumbing, and memories. We can harness and harvest something from it."

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Turning Detroit's Abandoned Homes Into Greenhouses

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When Steven Mankouche first saw the house at 3347 Burnside Street in Detroit, in 2013, it was buckling and scarred with burn marks 1. An artist named Andy Malone, who lived nearby, had just purchased the lot for $500 and was hoping to find some way to bring it back to life.