Grow Brownsville, INC. 501(c) (3)
Grow Brownsville centers the principles of social justice, food sovereignty, and community wealth. We implement community-controller training, workshops, and programming centered around social justice, environmental justice, food security, and green workforce development. As a community-based organization we have worked with our community partners to create and implement solutions to the rippling effects of the war on drugs and continued divestment in BIPOC communities. Our job is to center the solutions developed by the community and be the bridge between academic, and institutional support to accomplish its goals from the bottom up.
We aim to support the creation of a network of BIPOC farms, energy cooperatives, and community centered business & finance models to progress the movement towards sustainable, community led solutions through organizing projects, mutual aid efforts and pilots in collaboration with residents, CBOs, and institutions aligned with our mission.
Grow Brownsville (“GB”), builds food security through community organizing and mutual aid, while putting on education, and workforce development in the agritech, and green technology fields. Programs such as The Kombit Sustenance Farming program bring multigenerational groups together to grow food and share knowledge. As a non-profit farm-based initiative, GB is committed to repairing the historic and systematic discrimination against communities of color that restricts economic mobility and improved public health outcomes.
Sustenance farming within East Brooklyn, allows us to equip community members with intergenerational knowledge and farming workshops that impart skills needed to abundantly maintain community gardens. GB also creates educational programming in the field of controlled environmental agriculture that counters the historic social disenfranchisement of POC. GB organizes around combating environmental and institutional racism through hyperlocal food systems; working alongside schools, shelters, NYCHA residents, food vendors, and like-minded CBOs and educational institutions to create an ecosystem for success.
Our focus on Food Sovereignty and Justice through Kombit and Community Farming derives from personal experiences, community surveying, reviewing city collected data, understanding of infrastructure and demographics and a passion for a greener, more sustainable world. This starts hyper locally and food is the ever connecting human experience that directly affects well being in all capacities.
