Once MUG merged with Groundwork Milwaukee, leveraging public funding and grant sources to employ youth in garden maintenance and service-learning activities became a core function of the program. In its grant applications, media statements and newsletters, the program highlighted the benefits of urban agriculture as a tool for youth development and economic opportunity. MUG was also involved in community building activities, but it did not emphasize these in public communications as much as the youth and employment aspects. Ultimately, while community building remained core to MUG’s work, the framing focused on youth and jobs aligned well with that of other prominent nonprofit organizations in the city that engaged in urban growing, which will be discussed more below.Milwaukee Urban Gardens began by emphasizing its role in defending local gardens from the threat of development and thereby improving quality of life for Milwaukee residents, but this narrative never gained traction , so MUG’s focus shifted over time toward community programming, youth education, and employment as the program gained legitimacy for these activities and systematized its operations in order to maintain that legitimacy. MUG’s mission continued to be about improving quality of life for Milwaukee residents, drying weed but the understanding of how to fulfill that mission evolved from securing permanent gardens to enriching the social life of garden spaces.
Having been unable to successfully gain legitimacy for the work of preserving gardens, MUG was concomitantly unable to legitimize urban agriculture as a permanent land use, and today, most of Milwaukee’s community gardens are still vulnerable to development. MUG’s efforts have contributed to longer leases for many of the city-owned garden sites, and increased tenure promotes increased time investment by gardeners who maintain the sites. MUG has undoubtedly helped legitimize urban agriculture in Milwaukee by building a narrative around their value for youth and employment training and by providing the administrative infrastructure that affords gardeners and garden sites more continuity, but this legitimacy does not invoke permanence. Furthermore, some of the lots that MUG purchased opportunistically in its early years are not active as gardens anymore, and they actually pose a slight burden to the organization in terms of property taxes and upkeep. Paradoxically, these empty sites may serve as symbols of urban agriculture’s temporary nature despite being acquired with the goal of permanence. Today, Groundwork Milwaukee engages with city officials regularly in managing leases and water permits for various gardens, but the organization does not appear to be actively pushing for longer land tenure for the sites in its network or mobilizing gardeners to achieve more favorable urban agriculture policy.
Two factors that help explain why Groundwork Milwaukee doesn’t emphasize gardener organizing are the local civic conventions, which will be discussed more in chapter 3, and the wider organizational context of urban agriculture in Milwaukee. As noted above, MUG was not the first organization to oversee community gardens in Milwaukee; it was also not the most prominent in legitimizing and advocating for urban agriculture in the city. That distinction goes to Growing Power, a nonprofit urban farm with national renown. Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen, along with the leaders of other nonprofits such as Walnut Way, has played a large role in shaping the city’s relationship with urban agriculture. Allen started Growing Power in 1993, and as the organization grew it increasingly focused on addressing problems in its near north-side neighborhood by engaging at-risk youth and offering jobs to hard-to-employ people such as those with a criminal record, all in order to sell fresh produce affordably. Along with his innovative aquaponic growing techniques, this model earned Allen significant awards, including a Ford Leadership for a Changing World award in 2005 and a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. As noted above, in addition to Growing Power and MUG, other local organizations have contributed to the legitimacy of and appreciation for urban agriculture as a land use in Milwaukee. The Walnut Way Conservation Corporation, a community development corporation focused on revitalizing the Lindsay Heights neighborhood on Milwaukee’s Near North Side, has also elevated the status of urban agriculture locally.
Beginning in the 1990s, founders Sharon and Larry Adams organized the installation of community gardens and orchards at the request of neighborhood residents, who wanted to grow peaches and do something positive with vacant lots. From this network of agricultural spaces, Walnut Way now sells produce, canned goods, and value-added products to Milwaukee residents and restaurants. They employ youth and formerly incarcerated people in landscaping as well as agriculture and food production, providing job training and economic development while transforming the physical appearance of the neighborhood. As with MUG and Growing Power, Walnut Way has maintained legitimacy in part by its emphasis on job training, which has further solidified the local understanding of urban agriculture as beneficial for its workforce development potential. Another organization often mentioned as a source of legitimacy for urban agriculture in Milwaukee is Victory Gardens Initiative . Since 2009, VGI has organized an annual “garden blitz” during which hundreds of volunteers install up to 500 gardens in backyards across Milwaukee and some of its suburbs. They also manage a 1.5-acre urban farm in the Harambee neighborhood on Milwaukee’s Near North Side. After VGI had leased their farm space for four years through the MUG program, they were able to purchase the parcel from the city—one of only a handful of such cases in which the city sold land for permanent nonprofit-run urban agriculture. In 2013, during the public hearing for the proposed land sale, Alderman Milele Coggs, whose district includes the land in question, called VGI’s farm “great work that’s been done that’s helped the neighborhood and that is a shining example of what can be done with green space in urban areas” . The farm includes an orchard and scale production beds for sale to restaurants and for free distribution to the local community. There is also a community gathering space on the site, along with individual garden plots available for interested community members. VGI uses the site to grow and distribute a significant amount of organic produce, but according to an employee interviewed, their primary mission is actually related to education: they teach neighborhood children, youth in service-learning programs, and other volunteers about organic food production. Yet again, a primary strategy that this organization has used to attract resources and sustain itself over time has to do with youth development, further legitimizing urban agriculture as a vehicle for job training. Walnut Way and VGI are organizations that operate well-known community gardens as a vehicle to fulfill their larger missions, and these organizations have garnered a great deal of media coverage and local recognition for urban agriculture even though it is only one component of their work. The UW Milwaukee County Extension has also operated a network of community gardens since 1978, as noted above; this program, too, has received a lot of positive press coverage, especially in its early years. Over time, the program has tended to operate more on county land outside the city limits, but as a partner to other organizations in the city it has still formed an important part of the local urban agriculture milieu. The situation in Philadelphia is different, in part due to differences in the history of how community gardens have been supported. While gaining legitimacy was a major challenge for Milwaukee Urban Gardens, vertical growing systems the same was not true for Philadelphia’s main garden organization. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society had nearly 150 years of history and a well developed reputation by the time it established the Philadelphia Green program in 1973. The organization’s leader at the time, Ernesta Ballard, is described by many as a visionary; she certainly helped the organization maintain its relevance in changing times when she pushed for the creation of Philadelphia Green.
Long known for producing the Philadelphia Flower Show and providing a venue for suburban socialites to show off their horticultural panache, PHS ventured in a different direction with Philadelphia Green by helping urban residents build gardens on vacant lots. In 1978, explaining why PHS was spending $100,000 from its operating budget on the Philadelphia Green program, Ballard explained, “Our people love the program because it gets rid of their guilt about the inner city… It allows them to help people” . This statement reveals a foundational truth about the Philadelphia Green program: the critical audience from which organization leaders sought legitimacy was the PHS donor base rather than the urban gardeners. Philadelphia Green was developed as a strategy to help the larger organization of PHS maintain its legitimacy as times were changing, interest in horticulture as a status-signal was on the decline, and urban problems were making their way into the consciousness of Philadelphia’s elite. Initiated in this context, the Philadelphia Green program increased PHS’s activity within its home city, opened up new funding opportunities, and made a significant impact on the urban landscape. When it was first founded, Philadelphia Green faced no difficulty in gaining legitimacy because of its affiliation with PHS, but as with PHS overall, maintaining Philadelphia Green’s legitimacy over time required adaptation to a changing organizational environment. Philadelphia Green was originally conceived as a strategy to benefit urban residents by getting them interested in horticulture, yet as with many nonprofit urban agriculture programs, PHS discovered that more grant funding was available to start gardens than to maintain existing ones. To meet the shifting landscape of available funding opportunities, the program evolved into a greening tool for combatting blight and spurring neighborhood redevelopment. For its first ten years, Philadelphia Green mostly offered materials and technical support for urban residents interested in starting gardens. Then the early 1980s, the program’s longtime director J. Blaine Bonham proposed a project for the city’s bicentennial celebration, which he dubbed the Greene Country Townes. Invoking William Penn’s original vision for the city , this project targeted a series of neighborhoods for concentrated greening interventions that engaged neighbors on adjacent blocks in various transformations, such as adding window boxes, planting street trees, and installing community gardens and pocket parks on vacant lots. The Greene Country Townes were billed as demonstrations of how much potential greening had to bring beauty and revitalization to urban neighborhoods. Seeing the impact that intensive greening had on the selected Greene Country Townes neighborhoods, the leader of the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections reached out to partner with PHS on using federal Community Development Block Grant funds to green vacant lots across the city. In Philadelphia Green’s “clean-and-green” treatment, lots would be cleared of trash, covered with fresh sod, and then adorned with a small wooden fence to prevent vehicles from driving onto the lot and dumping more trash. As the clean-and-green operation continued throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, PHS worked with researchers at local universities to measure and document its effects. This rationalization furnished convincing evidence that greening vacant lots can improve property values , reduce crime , and even lower rates of depression among local residents . These frequently cited studies have legitimized investments in community gardens and green spaces in Philadelphia and beyond. However, the studies are based primarily on the clean-and-green treatment rather than the program’s gardens, and they appeal to growth coalition interests as much as the needs of marginalized residents. As one development professional explained, the clean-and-green treatment makes neighborhoods “more investment ready” . Well-maintained lots free of trash offer many benefits, not the least of which is their impact on neighborhood attractiveness; however, a lawn-like vacant lot does not offer the same social or nutritional benefits as a community garden. Philadelphia Green continued to support the creation of community gardens across the city, though this work became harder to fund through grants when the region’s large foundations shifted focus. While creating gardens and other neighborhood greening projects was the primary focus of Philadelphia Green’s early annual reports, the changing way these documents began to describe greening efforts reflects a conscious shift toward an economic and neighborhood development emphasis. Over time, an increasing share of the Philadelphia Green annual report was dedicated to large scale landscaping work such as the clean-and-green project, horticultural improvements in highly visible public spaces, and parks revitalization.