Urban Farming
Community Impact
On our Urban Farm, we’re growing more than just seeds. Our market & community-building efforts are helping our students & community residents thrive in every aspect of their lives. And our student staff is changing the face of food for our community.
There are 3 phases to Restore Farms, including school gardens for every classroom at our partner schools, a community garden & a greenhouse production facility that allows students to grow produce for wholesale distribution & direct community sale.
3 Ways We are Cultivating Change to
Cultivate Community
Tending to Our Gardens
1. Growing Food
Our elementary school gardens partner with RestoreOKC’s community partner schools to teach Pre-K through 4th grade students the basic fundamentals of growing & developing relationships with other students around maintaining their classroom garden bed. These garden beds produce opportunities for students to try new foods, think about health holistically & get them interested in gardening.
In 2019, these classroom beds sent home more than 1,150 pounds of fruits & vegetables with students who worked together to produce in their classroom gardens. Combined with our community garden, that’s a lot of veggies that went home over a very short growing season!
Additionally, in our neighborhood, we are cultivating an acre of community food forest where multiple perennial species are being planted in close proximity to one another for a sustainable yield in a confined area surrounding our community garden. The goal is a pleasing green space that serves as a social space to neighbors to produce more than food. Physical, cultural, environmental & emotional connections happen when people come together around food. Our hope is that this space begins to re-shape our social sense of place, values & identity and serve as a beautiful space for our community to flourish.
Providing for our Youth
2. Growing JObs
Jobs are a foundational element of change & free higher-education incentivizes graduation in a community where this has historically been a struggle. That’s why middle & high school students are employed at the farm where they gain entrepreneurial skills while earning income for themselves & their families.
Youth get paid to work after-school & during the summer, helping put an end to our “food desert” by maintaining the gardens, marketing, selling & delivering produce to businesses, chefs & those in need within our community. And through our commercial greenhouses & partnerships with SNAP & ONIE, we utilize a direct sales channel to provide our community with twice the produce for half of the cost!
At RestoreFarms, we’re offering jobs that pay now & offer higher-ed scholarships upon graduation. If our interns graduate from high school & our internship program, they can attend school at one of our partner universities for free! We are so thankful for our partner universities for making higher-education accessible to our youth.
Learn more about our internship program & how we’re growing jobs in our community.
Nurturing our Community
3. Growing Friendship
Presence. Respect. A greater sense of nurture. Reflection on the cycles of life, death & rebirth. These are proven benefits of gardening together & we think they’re also pretty great foundations for friendship. Hard work on the farm allows us to make space to cultivate alongside someone who may think differently than we do. For the moment, we are working together toward something beyond ourselves. It’s a sacred space of beauty & reflection, which is why we often use the gardens as a tool for prompting conversations about reconciliation, community, friendship & what it means to flourish.
Let’s Partner Up
With your help, we can continue to serve our community and positively impact those in it. We invite you to join us in seeing reconciliation accomplish restorative justice.