Urban Growers Collective is a Black- and women-led non-profit farm in Chicago, Illinois working to build a more just and equitable local food system. Our approach trains and educates the next generation of farmers and food system innovators, stimulating local economies to create measurable public health improvements.
Rooted in growing food, our mission is to cultivate nourishing environments which support health, economic development, healing, and creativity through urban agriculture.
UGC operates 8 urban farms totalling 11 acres primarily located on the South Side of Chicago; a 30-acre peri-urban farm in Chicago Heights established in 2024, and is a strategic partner in the 9-acre Green Era Campus renewable energy facility and hub for urban agriculture in Auburn Gresham. Our farms produce over 23,000 pounds of fresh produce annually, enabling market pathways for emerging growers and increasing food access for tens of thousands of food-insecure Chicagoans.
While our work is rooted in farming, UGC’s approach is holistic. Our farms also provide safe and healing spaces for life-enriching opportunities to hundreds of individuals each year through job training & education programming, public workshops, and land stewardship. UGC’s approach is trauma informed across its design, implementation and development and hopes to achieve the following key goals:
Build knowledge and awareness of healthy food, urban agriculture, and food systems
Increase access to affordable, nutritionally-dense food
Improve job readiness and employment skills
Improve socio-emotional learning, skills, and mindsets
Increase access to entrepreneurial and economic opportunities
Increase access to safe, healing spaces
Increase community engagement, cohesion, and social capital
Market Pathway Programming. UGC’s Market Pathways connect UGC’s nutrient dense and diverse produce to partners and communities for sale and distribution. Beyond nimbly meeting emergent food needs, our market pathways make produce financially accessible for consumers while also ensuring a fair return to farmers and emerging growers. UGC does this by accepting cash, credit/debit, as well as SNAP/Link benefits and providing a Link Double Value Match.
Education & Training Programs: UGC’s Education and Training programs provide accessible hands-on learning opportunities to support development of the next generation of farmers and food system leaders. UGC leverages its own experience in the food system to develop curriculum that is age, scale and goal appropriate for program participants that is responsive to industry trends and needs. UGC’s approach seeks to engage community members at multiple ages and trajectories to create multiple pathways for interventions and engagement across an individual’s life.
Outreach and Engagement: UGC operate in a set of intersecting ecosystems including but not limited to the food system, food justice and racial justice and equity. As a leader, disruptor, healer and integrator of systems, our work includes a long track record of working with allies and demonstrating what is possible.
Whether explicitly or implicitly, UGC’s program models and operations have been replicated locally and nationally. UGC has reached a maturity in its organizational processes that has allowed it to take the lessons we have learned from on-the ground program implementation to share our findings and best practices to inform how other institutions and organizations approach community food system development, urban agriculture, and other integrated fields of work. Through UGC and the Community Food Navigator, we engage 50+ community partners in the Chicago Area, and 11 national entities as partners in our work.