Advocates for Urban Agriculture (AUA): Advocates for Urban Agriculture provides support resources and education centering growers, farmers, earth stewards, land and water. They seek to reimagine our relationships to land, labor, and our food system while honoring Indigenous Sovereignty, Black liberation, LGBTQIA+ freedom, Disability Justice, and Immigrants’ rights. Their initiatives support growers through comprehensive programs that enhance soil health, provide essential water access, and offer invaluable mentorship. [Website] [IG]
Avondale Gardening Alliance: The mission of the Avondale Gardening Alliance is to mobilize neighbors to maximize the benefits of urban agriculture. They strive to create a safer and healthier Avondale, where people share their skills and resources to create a network of support for sustainable gardening practices. [Website] [IG]
Catatumbo Cooperative Farm: Catatumbo Cooperative Farm is an emerging immigrant, queer, gender non conforming, workers’ cooperative farm located in South Chicago. [IG]
Chicago Bread Club: The mission of the Chicago Bread Club is to share the art and knowledge of bread, and to promote and expand the racial equity of the regional grain economy. [Website] [IG]
Chicagoland Food Sovereignty Coalition: CFSC is working to create a better food system, by linking mutual aid groups, organizations, businesses, and individuals committed to the effort. [Website] [IG]
Chicago Neighborhood Planting Project: Helping Chicago plant native, edible fruit and nut trees – creating the conditions for a life worth living. [IG]
Community Food Navigator: The Community Food Navigator is a hub for knowledge in a growing community. Designed by and for those who grow food, the community is a space to connect, collaborate, and share information and resources. [Website] [IG]
Chicago Grows Food: Chicago Grows Food is a collaborative project devoted to expanding and unifying the food growing community in Chicagoland. They are working towards food sovereignty by providing the materials, tools, education and resources anyone needs to garden! [Website] [IG]
Deep Roots Project: Deep Roots Project teaches everyone, everywhere organic kitchen gardening and the interconnectedness of soil health, human health and planet health. [Website] [IG]
Evanston Grows: Evanston Grows is a collective impact organization dedicated to bringing together resources in the Evanston community to reduce food insecurity through increasing access to locally-grown produce and building community connections. [Website] [IG]
Food Matters Bronzeville: Food Matters is a food growing community cultivating health by providing a public market, commercial/teaching kitchens, greenhouse and apartments. [Website] [IG]
Freedom Fighter Herbs: FFH is a collective mutual aid effort on lands colonially known as Chicago, intended to support local organizers, care workers, and folks who experience police brutality in somatic wellness and relationship to plant kindred. [Website] [IG]
Fresher Together: A Black and LGBTQ+ owned and led food and farming collaboration dedicated to serving the people in our community with local nourishing foods and restorative spaces for healing, economic development, training and retreat. [Website] [IG]
Getting Grown Collective: Getting Grown Collective works to equip Black and Brown communities in the Chicagoland area with tools required to develop self-sustaining knowledge by supporting community-driven agriculture projects, collaborating with food and environmental policy makers, activating multi-generational engagement with agriculture and providing alternative access to health professionals and healthy lifestyle options. Their “Farm, Food, Familias” mutual aid initiative offers free meal distribution, cooking lessons and more. [Website] [IG]
Global Garden Refugee Training Farm: A vacant lot transformed into a vibrant farm in which 75+ refugees grow vegetables in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood. [Website] [IG]
Grow Greater Englewood: Grow Greater Englewood is a 501(c)(3) social enterprise that works with residents and developers to create sustainable local food economies, green businesses, and land sovereignty to empower residents to create wellness and wealth. [Website] [IG]
Hammond Community Garden: A food justice/sovereignty project in Hammond, IN which seeks to bring neighbors and local community members together in a collaborative setting, engage in mutual aid, and collectively meet our need for fresh, healthy food to be freely available and shared. [Website] [IG]
Inner City Muslim Action Network (IMAN): The Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) is a community organization that fosters health, wellness and healing in the inner-city by organizing for social change, cultivating the arts, and operating a holistic health center. IMAN incorporated as a nonprofit in 1997 through the drive of people directly affected by and deeply invested in social issues affecting communities of color living on Chicago’s South Side. They operate Go Green on Racine, a co-op inspired fresh market. [Website] [IG]
Just Roots Chicago: Just Roots works in collaboration with communities to develop access to local food through education, sustainable farming, and community-building. [Website] [IG]
The Love Fridge: The Love Fridge is a Chicago mutual aid group grounded in food, working to place and sustain community refrigerators across the city. They are powered by reciprocity, mutual respect, and the belief that being able to feed yourself is a right, not a privilege. Their goal is to care for our community while working against food apartheid and food waste, alongside other like-minded community groups. [Website] [IG]
Milpa Mizan: Stewarded by Femme Defensa, Milpa Mizan is a small team of urban farmers working to secure a space in Pilsen to grow food and offer educational opportunities for the community. [Website]
NeighborSpace Chicago: NeighborSpace is the only nonprofit urban land trust in Chicago that preserves and sustains gardens on behalf of dedicated community groups. They support more than 100 community gardens – through property ownership, insurance, water, stewardship, education, tool lending, project planning, fundraising support, troubleshooting, and more — so that community groups can focus on gardening and on their community-building vision, generating food, beauty, play, health, and safety for their neighborhoods. [Website] [IG]
Northwest Indiana Food Council: The NWI Food Council cultivates a just, thriving and regenerative food system for all in NW Indiana. [Website] [IG]
Ramshackle Farm: Queer punk rock farmers in Harvard, IL. [IG]
Rogers Park Seed Library: The Rogers Park Seed Library is a literal grassroots organization, offering community-oriented gardening lessons and free seeds. [IG]
Sistas in the Village: Sistas in the Village is an urban farm in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago committed to growing food to nourish an intergenerational African Indigenous community. [Website] [IG]
Slow Food Chicago: Slow Food Chicago is a volunteer-run, member-supported educational non-profit. Slow Food Chicago is one of the largest chapters of Slow Food USA with more than 500 members and 5,000 supporters. Through events and programs, they advocate for renewed interest in and support for our local food culture, promote biodiverse and sustainable producers and purveyors in our community and bring people together through the common language of food. [Website] [IG]
The Urban Canopy: The Urban Canopy is pioneering the local food cycle to create a more sustainable and equitable food system in Chicago. They are growers, distributors, composters and community members who seek to positively impact our city’s environment, people’s health, and local economy. They strive to make healthy produce accessible to all, reduce the miles fresh food travels, keep food waste out of landfills, and create and maintain local jobs. [Website] [IG]
Urban Growers Collective: 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. They aim to address the inequities and structural racism that exist in the food system and in communities of color. They provide hands-on job training and create economic opportunity for youth, and beginner BIPOC farmers. Our aim is to provide jobs while working to mitigate food insecurity and limited access to affordable, culturally-affirming, and nutritionally-dense food. [Website] [IG]
Veggie Mijas Chicago: Veggie Mijas Chicago chapter is a collective that aims to make plant-based food accessible to communities of color and folks of marginalized identities. They wish to co-create a shame-free, body positive and inclusive space with folks who are committed to anti-racism, compassion toward animals, reconnecting with their ancestral roots, and fighting for our collective liberation. [Website] [IG]
Zumwalt Acres: Zumwalt Acres is a regenerative agriculture community working to develop a model of land stewardship in Illinois that is ecologically sustainable and socially responsible, rooted in Jewish values. [Website]
beyond november 