A Just Harvest is awarding Rogers Park Farms the 2012 Sister Cecelia Fandel Award for Community and Economic Development. For more information on our banquet, visit our home page.
Rogers Park Farms’ vision is to form the cornerstone of a healthy, sustainable Rogers Park by creating an urban farming system that will grow an abundance of produce and fish in the neighborhood.
Rogers Park Farms plans to develop this urban farming system so that it enhances the quality of life for our community’s residents, including opportunities for residents to grow their own food, to purchase hyper-locally and sustainably grown food, to learn about the environment and to actively participate in building a more sustainable community. Rogers Park Farms also plans to provide job training and internship opportunities, with a special emphasis in engaging people who are young, poor or long-term unemployed.
Rogers Park Farms also wants to make a regional impact, helping to meet Chicago and the North Shore’s growing demand for local and sustainable food and reduce our communities’ dependence on polluting, oil-dependent agribusiness. Simply put, RPF wants to create a food system that has high yields on small parcels without fossil fuel inputs. They are working to create a community wide food system that has low energy and water inputs and turns food waste back into organic soil or renewable energy. This model requires “people power” instead of fossil fuels, and promotes education and employment opportunities for youth and community residents.
The neighborhood is very diverse in terms of race, income, national origin, level of education, and even religion, but it is fair to say that for the most part, people’s buildings, blocks and social circles tend to remain segregated. Rogers Park Farms wants to be a place where residents cross all these barriers and across the generations to collaborate on something in everyone’s self-interest.
Rogers Park Farms plans to do all this by coordinating existing urban farming projects (there are already 5 on the north end of Rogers Park), cultivating new ones, and developing a combination of vacant land and empty storefront properties with outdoor and indoor farming initiatives to anchor the project.
Chair Pam Richart emphasizes that this is different than the traditional model of economic development and gentrification where people from outside the community make an investment that they hope will yield profits for their company, but that instead RPF is actively harnessing the creativity and self-interest of the current community.
Board members are:
Pam Richart, Eco-Justice Collaborative & Chicago Bioneers
Marilyn Pagan-Banks, A Just Harvest
Kim Delong, Family Matters
John Hoekwater, Many People’s Church and The Common Cup
Milton Dixon, Midwest Permaculture
Christine Wellman, Transition Rogers Park
Sue Lannin, Rogers Park Resident
Chad White, Environmental Scientist