Mission / Vision

Our Mission

(Video courtesy of City Growers restaurant partner, Stone Hearth Pizza Co.)

City Growers’ mission is to transform vacant lots in Boston into intensive urban farms that are economically and environmentally sustainable.

We combine the resources of community organizations, neighborhood associations and local markets for fresh produce to accomplish our major goals:

  1. Creating employment for community members at livable wages
  2. Addressing food security issues by increasing local agricultural production capacity
  3. Increasing local access to affordable, nutrient-rich foods

City Growers is contributing to the new green economy in communities where economic revitalization is needed most.  In the coming years, we will create a checkerboard of productive green space in Boston’s inner city (more than twenty acres of 1/4 to 1-acre lots) where local growing talent thrives.

Our Vision

Would you believe that there are hundreds of acres of vacant land within Boston’s city limits?  Imagine the positive impact of converting many of these small abandoned spaces, one by one, into thriving, green farms. That is City Grower’s vision.

Our goal is to revitalize underutilized land, some of which has been sitting vacant for more than 30 years, to benefit economically and environmentally challenged communities.  The local neighborhoods are the center of our success and will play a pivotal role in their own economic development through small-scale intensive agricultural production. We work collectively with community groups to access land opportunities; we prepare the land for planting and train growers to cultivate it using carbon free practices. Ultimately, our farms will be managed and worked by local community residents.

How is City Growers different from other urban farm models?

  • We are a for-profit enterprise with an environmentally and economically sustainable model of urban agriculture that will provide living wages to local entrepreneurs.
  • We work collectively with community groups to access land opportunities; we prepare the land for planting and train growers to cultivate it using carbon free practices.