City Farm

City Farm, a program of the Resource Center, is a farm designed to operate on city-owned vacant land with the capacity to move as soon as the land is sold for development. It sells primarily to restaurants, but also operates a seasonal market stand and recently started a CSA. It runs an After School Matters program in the summer.

City Farm is a sustainable vegetable farm bordering Cabrini-Green and the Gold Coast. The farm boasts thirty varieties of tomatoes as well as beets, carrots, arugula, gourmet lettuces, herbs and more. All produce is grown in composted soil generated from various sources, such as restaurant trimmings from some of the city’s finest kitchens.

See also: Resource Center

Chicago Botanic Garden

The Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG) is a  385-acre Garden featuring 24 display gardens and four natural areas, uniquely situated on nine islands surrounded by lakes. Their mission is to promote the enjoyment, understanding, and conservation of plants and the natural world.

At the Garden, you can take a course, attend a lecture, buy a gardening book, find 2.2 million garden plants, or have your mystery plant identified. Visitors to the CBG website can help themselves to detailed plant and gardening information.

The CBG also offers a series of internships and seasonal jobs for youth and adults. See Green Youth Farm and Windy City Harvest.

Green Youth Farm

The Green Youth Farm, a project of the Chicago Botanic Garden, offers students the opportunity to learn all aspects of organic farming — from planting seeds and starts to managing a hive of bees, from cooking with the food they grow to selling it at farmstands and markets (and to the Garden Café, where the chef incorporates the fresh organic produce into many menu items available to Chicago Botanic Garden visitors).

Students are paid a stipend for four hours per week in the spring and fall and 20 hours per week in the summer working at the farms, but the benefits they gain far outweigh the wages they earn. By the end of the season, participants have learned how to work together as a team, gained valuable job skills, discovered a whole new way to look at the food they eat, and grown their support system to include supervisors, program coordinators, legislators, and their fellow participants.

The one-acre farm in suburban North Chicago is located in the Greenbelt Forest Preserve off Green Bay Road. The quarter-acre site is in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, at 3555 West Ogden Avenue. An additional farm was added in 2009 — the Washington Park Farm at Dyett High School at 555 E. 51st Street added an additional three-quarters of an acre of growing space to the farms.

Finally, Chicago Public Schools has hosted one more Jr. Green Youth Farm since 2006, currently located at Helen J. McCorkle School at 4421 S. State Street. This Jr. Green Youth Farm serves 10 to 12 middle-school students after school and for a six-week program during the summer.

Cousin’s Incredible Vitality

Cousin’s Incredible Vitality is a restaurant, raw culinary art school, and community center. It exists to serve a growing community of health-conscious individuals. They offer the high quality prepared gourmet raw food, products, services and education, while uniting those in search of knowledge with those who are well-informed, engaging in social activities, support groups and discussions.

They offer community outreach programs to help educate our coming generations on how nutrition effects their experience in life, as well as enlightening people in poorer neighborhoods about how they can prevent diseases and illness, such as diabetes, hypoglycemia, systemic candida, colon cancer and more.

The restaurant, located on 3038 W. Irving Park Rd, also hosts events and meetup groups. A variety of foods and products can be purchased from the online store.

Greencorps Chicago

Greencorps Chicago is the city of Chicago’s community gardening and green industry job training program. They offer three programs to community groups: Plant Distribution Days, Garden Assistance, and the Green Industry Job Training program.

Their mission is to promote environmental stewardship and improve the quality of life by establishing natural spaces that are safe, healthy and sustainable through hands-on involvement with trainees and community partners.  They do this by creating awareness, building commitment, developing expertise and providing the resources necessary to create community gardens and green spaces.

Greencorps Chicago, established in 1994, is a program of the City of Chicago Department of Environment in partnership with WRD Environmental.

About Greencorps Chicago’s Programs

• Plant Distribution Days and Technical Assistance:
  Five times a year, Greencorps Chicago distributes seeds, vegetables, annuals, perennials and bulbs free of charge to community organizations. We also provide technical assistance, garden materials and hands-on labor. Groups must apply and certify their community gardens to participate in our plant distribution days or receive assistance. We do not distribute plants to residential gardeners on our Plant Distribution Days.
• The Great Perennial Divide:
  Residential gardeners and non-certified garden groups are welcome to donate, swap, and/or receive perennial plants, trees and shrubs at this annual event, sponsored by the Chicago Botanic Garden, Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, Greencorps Chicago and Openlands.

• Garden Assistance:
  Assistance is available for community garden groups in the form of horticultural expertise from staff, installation and maintenance help from our job trainees and garden materials including plants, soil and tools.

• Green Jobs Training:
  Each spring, Greencorps Chicago accepts and hires approximately 70 people into its nine-month green industry job training program.

• Mayor’s Landscape Awards:
  Schools, community organizations and businesses who make an outstanding contribution to the city’s environment may apply for and receive recognition through this annual awards program.

• Greencorps Chicago – Calumet Program:
  The Greencorps Chicago – Calumet (GCC) program will specialize in ecological restoration training and use of those skills to restore Chicago’s Calumet area open spaces.  GCC will hire and train crew members on restoration techniques, chainsaw operation and safety, herbicide application, seed collection, plant identification, regional ecology, and prescription burn training.