Urban Harvest - Social and Environmental Resilience through Community and Family Food Gardens

Snapshot Solution

Urban Harvest works with communities to grow healthy, local food

Ben Getz

Urban Harvest works with communities to design, install and co-manage ecological, beautiful and highly productive urban food gardens.

Working at the individual, family and community scales, our projects provide jobs, skills, purpose and fresh organic food to the most vulnerable communities.

Through valuable corporate social investment, we are able to provide quality infrastructure, training and ongoing support to ensure thriving and sustainable home and community food gardens.

Last update: 14 Jan 2021

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Solution history

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Context

Challenges addressed

Lack of alternative income opportunities

Changes in socio-cultural context

Lack of food security

Unemployment / poverty

Scale of implementation

Local

Ecosystems

Green spaces (parks, gardens, urban forests)

Theme

Adaptation

Food security

Health and human wellbeing

Sustainable livelihoods

Location

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

East and South Africa

Impacts

Our community gardens projects:

Provide freshly harvested, chemical-free, packaging-free and travel-mile-free food available to our beneficiaries onsite at each of our 420+ projects! These gardens feed thousands of people every day.
Provide jobs to previously unemployed community members. These individuals become garden champions who are trained by us and in partnership with our support teams, maintain beautiful and productive food gardens for beneficiary communities.
Our garden installations include the temporary employment and upskilling of unemployed local community members for the duration of the building process.
Our gardens provide outdoor classrooms and educational opportunities for school children who are invited to participate in and learn about all aspects of food gardening
Our gardens use earthworm farming and aerobic composting to recycle green waste and kitchen wet waste into organic compost for use in gardens.