Every Garden Begins With
A Seed
Green Guerillas supports community gardens across New York City as places where people grow food, build relationships, and create positive change. What started as a grassroots effort to reclaim vacant lots has grown into a citywide movement.
Grow With Us: $60,000 so 60 gardens can open their gates wider
By December 31
For years, some of Iraida De Jesus’s neighbors couldn’t get into her garden.
Iraida has run Jardín de la Familia in Claremont Village, the Bronx, for more than six years, as an unpaid volunteer. She grows food there, runs a pantry, and knows most of the people who come through the gate by name. But neighbors who use wheelchairs or walkers, and parents pushing strollers, were stuck outside the gate, because the garden’s paths weren’t built for them.
This June, that changed. Paid Green Guerillas youth interns built new porous pathways alongside Iraida, and now those neighbors can come in.
Across New York, other gardeners are still waiting for their own yes. This year, 56 gardens submitted needs assessments asking Green Guerillas for help, more than it can reach, because every project is built by paid young people from the same neighborhoods, and there are only so many it can hire.
In November and December, Green Guerillas plans next season. That is when it sets how many young people it can hire and how many gardens they can serve. In 2026, paid young people worked alongside gardeners across 39 workdays. If Grow With Us reaches its goal, Green Guerillas can plan to hire 40 young people and serve 60 gardens in 2027.
That is why Green Guerillas is raising $60,000, and why the gifts that come in before Thanksgiving matter most.
A gift before Thanksgiving decides who gets in next.
It started with a seed.
Green Guerillas supports and protects New York City community gardens. Working with gardeners, youth, and local leaders, we advocate and educate to champion environmental and food justice, growing community garden by garden.
It began in the 1970's, when Liz Christy, Amos Taylor, and Martin Gallent threw seed "green-aids" over the fences of vacant lots and turned a debris-filled lot at Bowery and Houston into a community garden.
Today, more than 600 community gardens grow across the city, and Green Guerillas has grown alongside them as a trusted and durable partner to the gardeners who steward these spaces.
Every garden grows the same way, and your support helps at every step →
Summer Youth Tillers and
Youth Empowerment Pipeline
Plant a seed.
Young people trained and employed through our multi-year workforce and leadership development program work alongside garden leaders, learning growing practices and how food and culture hold a neighborhood together, while earning $17 to $19 an hour. Returning stewards earn higher wages, mentor younger participants, and design workshops and campaigns that address racial and environmental justice issues affecting their own neighborhoods.
Harvest for Neighborhoods
Tend it together.
Each year we supply garden groups with seeds, plants, soil, and tools, and invest deeply in 40+ gardens through workdays and hands-on builds. We lead trainings on composting, soil health, and food production, and host cooking demonstrations and Open Garden Days with legacy gardeners, teaching artists, and community chefs. Gardeners also use our Seed Library and Tool Lending Library.