Food Well Alliance to allocate over $100k to community gardens

Food Well Alliance is set to distribute $110,000 in grants to 62 community gardens in and around Atlanta as part of the non profit’s ongoing work to “connect and build healthier communities.” 

Since its founding in 2015, the organization has focused on supporting more than 300 community gardens, orchards and urban farms through volunteer work and direct resources. Its Community Garden Grant program has supplied $570,000 in the past nine years to gardens in a five-county area around Atlanta. 

This year, Food Well aims to distribute $110,000 in direct funding through two different grants: The $1,500 Garden Improvement Grants for 60 community gardens and the larger Garden Forward Grant that supplies $10,000 to two gardens. 

Food Well Alliance Marketing Director Amy Hudson said its the organization’s priority to “support local growers and prioritize growers who are serving what we call low income, low access communities.” 

In the five Metro Atlanta counties, Cobb, Clayton, Dekalb, Fulton and Gwinnett there are over 200 community gardens. The scope of the gardens is wide – some gardens have only a few members and a single plot while others have over a hundred members and entire orchards growing. Each one, though, is a space where residents of an area come together to plant, tend and maintain produce. 

Food Well Alliance Grants and Relationship Manager Bobby Farmer said the gardens help change peoples’ perspective around food, too. He hopes people can better connect to how and where food is grow and in turn change lifestyle behaviors. 

Farmer said the plots and greenery are spaces for “growing food, but also sharing knowledge around healthy eating, around fresh produce.” 

In 2023 a study from Emory University found that 75 percent of Atlanta’s residents lived within a half-mile of fresh produce in 2020, but only 36 percent of stores in Black neighborhoods carried fresh produce compared to 61 percent of stores in non-Black neighborhoods.

Community gardens provide an alternative to typical grocery stores, particularly for people without garden space in their homes to supplement their diets with self-grown fruits, vegetables and herbs. Farmer said while most of the food grown is consumed by the people who tend their plots, about 80 percent of gardens also donate produce either to food banks or friends and neighbors. 

“These gardens are largely volunteer and community led initiatives, and our ability to direct some kind of dedicated funding to those spaces has been an important component to keeping the gardens thriving,” Farmer said. 

That is why Food Well started the grant program. Farmer said the grants “came from a place of understanding the role that community gardens play within metro Atlanta specifically within our local food system as well as the role of gardens as places where people are interacting with each other.”

Starting in 2015 the Garden Improvement Grants have sent $1,500 to existing community gardens to pay for improvements and items like lumber, tools, storage, compost, soil, seeds and irrigation systems. The larger Garden Forward Grants is a project-oriented allocation for “more established” gardens looking to take on a larger venture. 

“These gardens do a lot on their own, but having a dedicated organization able to put resources into these spaces is an important and neat way to keep this kind of network of Metro Atlanta community gardens thriving,” Farmer said. 

Austell Community Garden Manager Andrea Searles first applied for the Garden Improvement Grant about seven years ago. She joined the Austell garden eight years ago as a volunteer coordinator, where she quickly learned the space had little to no budget. Many community gardens charge a membership fee but Austell does not.

Soon after, Searles met the Food Well team and found out about what she called “free money.” She quickly applied for the grant and received her first $1,500. 

Searles said that chunk of funding went to various “beautification” efforts like painting a fence and buying lumber. 

“It was a strict $1,500 but we sure needed it,” Searles said.

After the first grant, the garden kept growing. Searles became a Cobb County Master Gardener and took over as manager of the Austell garden. Now, the farm is just over two acres large with a full tree orchard. 

Last year Searles decided to return to the grant program, this time for the newly-created Garden Forward Grant. She applied and received the first round of $10,000 grants and has used the funds to create a drip irrigation system to water the trees. Searles called it a what she said. 

For this year’s round of applicants Searles decided to have the Austell garden sit it out to “give someone else an opportunity.” She said many people can’t get gardens started because of a lack of access to basic needs, but financial and physical help from Food Well changes things. 

“When you get that extra help with your hands, it makes all the difference in the world,” Searles said.

Searles said she’s grateful for the help from Food Well Alliance because of their work in community gardens, a space to “just have fellowship.”

“People in the community, young, old, people who are lonely or who just like to work outsie have a space and they can just go out there,” Searles said.

Food Well Alliance representatives said the full list of 2024 community garden grant recipients will be announced later this spring.