What happens when vacant lots become places of care?

Across Providence and beyond, neighbors are turning neglected land into places of regeneration. Pearl Street Garden Cooperative is guiding the transformation of these degraded landscapes into thriving gardens. Through teaching, community events, and the slow work of soil regeneration, they create pathways for people to understand and steward the landscapes around them.

Since 2024, the cooperative has planted Miyawaki-style microforests, community food forests, native meadows, rain gardens and pollinator gardens with residential and community partners. Their work is rooted in the belief that ecological restoration and community building are beautifully intertwined.

At the start of 2025, Pearl Street Garden Cooperative received a Grassroots Fund Seed grant to support their Regenerative Gardening curriculum, developed in partnership with GardenTime's Green Reentry Program. In the fall of 2025, they received a Grow grant to support strategic planning and cooperative development as they successfully formalized their structure and incorporated as a worker-owned cooperative.

Pearl Street's dream is a Providence, and Rhode Island, where every neighborhood is connected by gardens that provide food, habitat, shade, and a sense of belonging. And where communities directly shape and steward the landscapes around them.

Learn more about this group: https://grassrootsfund.org/groups/pearl-street-garden-collective