The PHS City Harvest program taps the skills and energy of urban gardeners to make fresh, nutritious produce more widely available in under-resourced neighborhoods.

PHS City Harvest

The PHS City Harvest program taps the skills and energy of urban gardeners to make fresh, nutritious produce more widely available in under-resourced neighborhoods.

Through City Harvest, PHS and its partners have empowered urban gardeners to share the fruits of their labor with families in need. The program is creating an infrastructure of agricultural supply and education centers, as well as expanding fresh food production, distribution, and consumption in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, thereby creating a healthier future for thousands of city residents. City Harvest also has offered more than 600 inmates opportunities to gain job skills, give back to their communities, and look forward promising futures. Click here to support this important initiative.

  

How City Harvest Works

PHS City Harvest is powered by partnership. With training from PHS staff, inmates of the Philadelphia Prison System grow seedlings at a prison greenhouse, and thousands more seedlings are started at neighborhood-based greenhouses run by nonprofit partners. The inmates receive training in gardening and basic landscaping along with valuable life-skills lessons. The seedlings are then transplanted and grown in community gardens throughout the city, as well as in the prison’s onsite garden.

With facilitation from SHARE (Self Help and Resource Exchange, a food distribution network), the resulting produce is donated to food cupboards, and the Health Promotion Council offers tastings, nutrition workshops, and cooking demonstrations at cupboards and gardens.

PHS City Harvest gardeners grow and donate more than 20,000 pounds of produce each year, helping to feed about 1,000 families per week during the growing season, including residents of neighborhoods with some of the highest rates of poverty and food insecurity in the region.

PHS City Harvest

• Provides support to local growers who offer organically grown produce in high-need neighborhoods
• Offers nutrition education for recipients of donated food
• Creates and maintains “green resource centers,” a network of neighborhood-based greenhouses that support and empower small-scale, entrepreneurial food growers
• Includes Roots to Re-Entry, an innovative green jobs and reintegration component for prison inmates

City Harvest is supported by the following funders:

The 25th Century Foundation
The Bennett Family Foundation
The Burpee Foundation
The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation
The Independence Foundation
The Forrest C. & Frances Lattner Foundation
The Lenfest Foundation
Northeast SARE
The Philadelphia Prison System Board of Trustees
The Lawrence Saunders Fund

According to the US Department of Agriculture, millions of people in America live in “food deserts,” areas that lack easy access to affordable fresh food. Click here to learn more.