Since 2020 Neighborhood Grow Plan has supported neighbors to grow food, share knowledge, and build community from East Boston to Mattapan, Holyoke to Orange.
Through porch conversations, multilingual outreach, garden kits, community garden design and small business worker co-op development workshops, and seasonal art and food installations at local farms, the group supports renters, immigrant families, youth organizers, and working-class neighbors in growing food where they live. What started during the pandemic as a food security initiative is growing into a people-powered movement rooted in gardening, cultural knowledge, and collective care.
Over the years, the Grassroots Fund has supported the Neighborhood Grow Plan through projects focused on urban subsistence gardening, food forest stewardship, studies in drought-resistant soil layering, and herbal medicine education.
With a Fall 2025 Grow Grant, the group is launching a Media Documentation and Press Training program for 15 BIPOC growers, farmers, and herbalists. Participants receive training in storytelling, interviewing, videography, and press skills while documenting climate-resilient growing practices rooted in their own communities. Funding supports participant stipends, access to translation, trainers, and videography materials to ensure that working-class community members can fully participate. The program focuses on developing mini-documentaries on cultural crops, food medicine, seed saving, herbal traditions, and neighborhood leadership in food justice.
The project builds on Community Garden Design Workshops supported by a 2025 Seed Grant, which helped residents, organizers, artists, and young people imagine and design shared growing spaces together.
Neighborhood Grow Plan believes food justice starts with neighbors practicing regular and intentional care for each other through growing food and making food medicine, sharing knowledge, and creating spaces where people can rest, learn, express and enjoy being together.
Learn more about this group: https://grassrootsfund.org/groups/neighborhood-grow-plan-growing-food-secure-futures
