green guerillas

helping community gardens thrive

Green Guerillas serves as a vital resource center to:

Help keep community gardens vibrant
Through our annual plant and material giveaways and ongoing horticultural assistance, we help dozens of community garden groups get the plants, materials, and assistance they need to manage green, well tended gardens.

Help gardeners use their gardens as outdoor classrooms, cultural hubs, and environmental centers
Each year we give scores of garden leaders the help they need to hold events and garden fairs, give workshops, make partnerships with schools, and bring people together all growing season long.

organizing for a future

Our community organizers use outreach and organizing as a tool to revitalize gardens, re-energize garden groups, and help garden leaders sustain strong neighborhood coalitions.

Revitalize gardens
We work to revitalize inactive garden sites by organizing new garden groups to tend to these green spaces for years to come.

Re-energize garden groups
Our organizers help garden groups create and carry out outreach action plans to recruit new members and raise their profile. We also help them take simple, yet powerful steps to get more people to be an active part of the life of their gardens: keep their garden gates open, plant up inactive beds, and hold colorful community events.

Sustain garden groups for the long haul
We help garden leaders shore up their groups by creating by-laws and running effective meetings. By helping community garden leaders fill out grant applications and manage grant funds, we can help them put their grassroots groups on the road to sustainability. In the past few years alone we have helped community gardeners obtain over $35,000 in direct grants from foundations and council people – and there are more grant funds in the pipeline.

Support strong neighborhood coalitions
We help neighborhood garden coalitions have meetings, conduct outreach, hold events, coordinate services, and gain political power on the local level.

NYC Community Gardens Coalition
East NY Gardeners Association
La Famila Verde
Harlem United Gardeners

growing food in the city

Producing a more bountiful harvest
Through our Harvest for Neighborhoods campaign we help 30 Bedford-Stuyvesant community garden groups grow more fresh healthy food, distribute it in their historic Brooklyn neighborhood, and come together as a community of urban farmers.

Click to see the Harvest for Neighborhoods gardens on an interactive map.

Increasing food security
The harvest beds we cultivate help change the food equation in Bed-Stuy by producing hundreds of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables that go directly to the kitchens of emergency food providers.

Creating a new urban farm & community garden
We are helping a dedicated group of Ocean Hill/Bed Stuy residents turn a large vacant lot into an urban farm, community garden, and outdoor education center to grow food and strengthen community. Two local emergency food providers, Brooklyn Rescue Mission and Neighbors Together, are active partners in this exciting project.
(see a slideshow)

engaging youth

Our groundbreaking youth programs -- the Youth Mural Project and the Youth, Art & Environment Fellowship Program -- engage young people as true partners in community gardens while nurturing their artistic and leadership skills, environmental awareness, and commitment to community action.

Through the Youth Mural Project, Green Guerillas partners with children, teenagers and community gardeners to paint colorful murals that brighten community gardens.

YMP uses the creative arts as a tool to forge unique partnerships between community gardeners and young people. Together they envision, design and create colorful murals, all the while nurturing a new generation of neighborhood leaders.

As 14 year old muralist Ernesto Matthews put it upon completing the mural entitled Seeds for the Future, Reaching for the Stars in Brownsville, Brooklyn: “People are going to come here and look at this mural and think, ‘One day my life could be like that.’ And they are going to want to make it that way.”

Our Youth, Art & Environment Fellowship Program provides internships, mentoring, and job skills to high school and college youth. Our interns serve as community organizers, river guides, gardeners, tour leaders, curriculum developers, educators, and neighborhood planners.

working on critical issues

Preservation
Though many community gardens have been preserved in the last few years, there are still garden groups who face the loss of their gardens to development. As they turn to us for help, we will provide garden leaders with advice and advocacy assistance.

Environmental issues
Many community gardeners also seek to use their gardens to address critical environmental issues. Through our work with the Water Resources Group, we help gardeners install and manitain water harvesting sytems to conserve water and prevent pollution. We also help gardeners grow organically.

our history & mission

Our history
In 1973 Liz Christy, a Lower East Side artist, gathered her friends and neighbors together to clean out a vacant lot on the corner of Bowery and Houston Streets. Calling themselves the Green Guerillas, these visionaries created a vibrant community garden and sparked the modern community gardening movement in New York City.
The Green Guerillas tapped the time, talent, and energy of their members. They took on projects as varied and interesting as the city itself - they threw seed “green-aids” over the fences of vacant lots, installed window boxes, planted flowers in tree pits – and helped people transform city-owned vacant lots into community gardens that serve as botanic gardens, vest pocket parks, urban farms, and as expressions of art, ecology, and culture.
More than three decades later, Green Guerillas is a vital 501c3 nonprofit organization, and there are 600 community gardens with a whole new host of challenges.

Our mission
Green Guerillas uses a unique mix of education, organizing, and advocacy to help people cultivate community gardens, sustain grassroots groups and coalitions, engage youth, paint colorful murals, and address issues critical to the future of their gardens.

our first garden

Founded in 1973 by Liz Christy and the Green Guerillas, this is New York City’s original community garden. Maintained by a group of dedicated volunteers, the Liz Christy Garden serves as an inspiration to gardeners of all skill levels and as an urban oasis for residents of the Lower East Side and the East Village. The garden is a colorful stop for birds, bees, and tourists from every continent
The garden is located on the northeast corner of Bowery and Houston streets.The beauty of this urban green space can be enjoyed in every season, including winter during the weekly open hours.
To see the Liz Christy gardeners’ website