Our Partners / Nuestros Socios

Redevelopment Grants and Partnerships

As our project moves forward we have been lucky enough to receive support from the following wonderful organzations:

Blue1674 a next generation innovation center, supporting all forms of entrepreneurship from events, filmmakers, artists, engineers, and designers. They have been generous enough to donate their space to us free of charge for nearly all of our garden redesign sessions. Not only have we used their space for our sessions, but for one on one meetings with garden members about individual projects.

Local Restaurants: Pl-zen, Nueva Leon and Simone's each donated food to help nourish our members at our evening meetings. With their generous support our members were able to focus on the meeting, and not their empty stomachs.

NeighborSpace is a nonprofit urban land trust in Chicago that preserves and sustains gardens on behalf of dedicated community groups. They shoulder the responsibilities of property ownership — such as providing basic insurance, access to water, and links to support networks – so that community groups can focus on gardening. They are much more than a partner for this project, they are the reason it is all possible. In 2013 NeighborSpace secured $75,000 of Open Space Impact Fee (OSIF) funds for the project.

St. Pius Parish has been a very generous supporter of our project, contributing their space to us to hold our meetings in free of charge. They have allowed us to conduct outreach to their partitioners about different garden related events, and we look forward to continuing our partnership in the future.

Thank you to our generous donors! We have received grants and direct donations from the following organizations:

Catholic Relief Services Rice Bowl Grant in the amount of $1,500. We plan to use this money to construct two chicken coops that will double as a handicap accessible raised bed, supplies for the chickens for one year and an enclosed fence structure around the chickens that will allow them to be free range.

Seed Saver's Exchange generous provided us with a donation of seeds that we agreed to pass on by saving the seeds from plants we grow this coming season.

High Mowing Organics provided us with a donation of 100 seed packets to help us save seeds and teach the community about local food growth.

We still have a long list of projects we need assistance funding! If you know of an organization that would like to support our work please contact rootsandrays@gmail.com.