[ali]

Hi, all! As some may know, the City funded a team to develop Philadelphia’s first-ever Urban Ag plan.
Sign up to voice your opinion, thoughts, and concerns here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/philadelphias-urban-agriculture-plan-public-meeting-tickets-79786534673

Come prepared with all of your thoughts, opinions, and concerns.

Some background:
The Mayor’s Fund provided the money to make the plan happen, and worked with Representatives from Parks & Recreation, the Office of Sustainability, other City agencies, and a few members of the Food Policy Advisory Council (FPAC) Urban Agriculture Subcommittee (none of whom are active on this community forum). You can find the RFP document here.

Also, there’s been a recent, important development. “On October 31, Philadelphia City Council passed a bill overhauling the city’s process for selling and distributing publicly owned land. Learn what these changes mean for community gardeners and others seeking to turn vacant land into green space.” Check it out here:

What does Philadelphia’s new public land policy mean for community gardeners?

Some of my thoughts and background below, which is wholly independent of any specific organization as I represent myself.

A big concern on my end is the lack of any type of funds whatsoever to implement a plan which they just spent $100-$125k to develop, but they do have the desire to secure funding after they develop the plan. It seems like urban-ag is a big afterthought from our community leaders and politicians; I plan to bring this specific subject up to ask for specifics within the plan as to how implementation will occur, as well as what their communications strategy or plan will be. I noticed they failed to reach us here on Grounded in Philly, which has so far reached 130,000 Philadelphians through the previous 6 years of operations. I’d previously invited them to beta test and use it, which they (members of FPAC), did not and failed to do their duty of community outreach. But that didn’t stop us from growing! In just the past 8 months following the redesign of Grounded in Philly, we’ve increased users by more than 20%–so over 15,000 people visited GroundedinPhilly.org in 2019 to read about how to start, stay, or participate in urban ag in Philly!

Solving for complex problems–such as developing a strategy for Philadelphia’s urban agriculture plan– requires all of us in the community to have our voices heard, along with the requisite variety of experts, thinkers, farmers, community leaders, etc. to be able to come up with the best possible solution. One that can succeed, not one that is an afterthought or that has a poor communications strategy.

Please send me a private message or reply with any thoughts you may have ahead of time?

[ali]

UPDATE: https://groundedinphilly.org/groups/advocates/forum/topic/philadelphias-urban-agriculture-plan-growing-from-the-root/

Stay tuned for the announcement of the next set of community meetings. Tonight’s meeting overfilled the room and there were a lot of great people–a wonderful surprise as I expected no very many people would be in attendance.

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