As people who care deeply about green spaces across New York City, we are in the midst of an exciting moment. Key transitions across the City government and within the Parks Department itself offer us an important opportunity to work together to strengthen communities and provide stronger support for green spaces across the city.

On behalf of community gardeners across the City, we urge you to ensure that each level of the City government understands the importance of supporting community gardens and their stewards. Community gardeners provide their neighborhoods with tangible resilience, create food access, foster life-giving connections between people and nature, strengthen community bonds, engage youth, empower seniors, and foster biodiversity and environmental resilience.

As you consider priorities and leadership for GreenThumb under the next administration, we respectfully ask you to shape these priorities around the following three essential, meaningful actions:

**UPHOLDING INDIGENOUS PRACTICES AND VALUES, INCLUDING**
--Acknowledging the Lenape, Canarsie peoples and the wisdom we learn from them in collective care of the land;
--Facilitating the planting of native species and more natural habitats that foster the preservation of, and education about, biodiversity while empowering community gardeners to develop and reconnect to culturally meaningful plants and structures in their gardens;
--Facilitating and advocating for greater autonomy in community land ownership and use.

**PROTECTING GREEN SPACES AND THEIR STEWARDS, PARTICULARLY IN HISTORICALLY MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES**
--Prioritizing land preservation by working across city agencies to ensure that community gardens have permanent protections from real estate development and stabilizing relationships with garden groups by offering license agreements for longer periods of time;
--Increasing garden space to affirm the essential connection between people and nature, fostering intergenerational connections and growing practices that center culturally relevant foods;
--Covering all community gardens through liability insurance, so as to not leave garden groups susceptible to burdensome, unfair fines and fees;
--Completing infrastructure repairs that have been delayed for years to ensure our spaces are safe for the public, and proactively undertake future infrastructure repairs.

**SUPPORTING PROGRAMMING ROOTED IN FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESILIENCE **
--Opening conduits for community gardens to connect more with their communities, encouraging local civic groups and not-for-profits to engage more.
--Providing creative options, materials and space for growing in different satellite neighborhood spaces in need -- churches, schools, backyard garden pop-ups, mobile education stations such as the Bronx Children’s Museum’s eco bus.
--Creating programming that unites gardens, making it easy and fluid to share resources across networks in order to advance food sovereignty and environmental resilience across the city.
For example, creating a professional incubator for next-generation farmers and gardeners, engaging experienced and elder growers, immigrant mentors, creative healers and gardening therapeutics where all participants are appropriately compensated.

**CULTIVATING COMMUNITY-FOCUSED, CIRCULAR ECONOMIES**
--Increasing educational and financial support for composting;
--Allowing gardens to create and sell products, fostering financial autonomy and a circular economy;
--Providing official status to gardens as front-line agricultural and environmental protection areas, including heightened legal protections through designating community gardens as Critical Environmental Areas (CEAs).
--Providing tools and resources to help gardens gain financial independence.

The organization should be led by a person with a deep commitment to racial justice; training in diversity, equity and inclusion; and experience advancing food and environmental justice. Part of shifting towards an equity lens means purposefully adopting an openness to learning and growing together. Leadership and staff at GreenThumb should listen to community gardeners, and take meaningful, concrete actions to build trust and center equity. Leadership and staff should foster the following actions across the agency:

**REPAIRING & RESPONDING**
--Requiring all GreenThumb staff to serve regular hours in gardens, spending time with gardeners to experience, observe, listen and develop relationships and understanding;
--Prioritizing timely support including punctual communication and supply deliveries.

**COLLABORATING**
--Centering gardeners in clearly defined decision making; allowing the community to lead.
--Hiring community gardeners for key staff positions so that the priorities of the people served by the agency are fully reflected within and across the agency;
--Compensating community gardeners for taking leadership roles within programming and mentoring the youth in GreenThumb’s youth program;
--Making the licensing process a transparent, collaborative one, crafted with meaningful input from gardeners (for example, holding town hall meetings, gathering input through a form or poll, asking for suggestions on social media);
--Being a vessel to collect, reflect and uplift ideas from the gardens:  Times change. Issues change. Gardeners bring new approaches to organizing, gardening, relating to their communities.

**BEING ACCOUNTABLE**
--Conducting an annual review of leadership that prominently incorporates feedback from their staff as well as primary garden contacts, with findings presented to the public on GreenThumb’s website;
--Conducting an annual review of outreach coordinators that includes a structured, meaningful evaluation from the community they serve, with findings presented to the public on GreenThumb’s website;
--Training staff to be more proactive in their duties and in becoming effective advocates and liaisons between gardens and government entities and agencies;
--Ensuring that internal structure, staff salaries and benefits and any grants are reflective of racial and social justice values.

**IMPROVING & EXPANDING**
--Hiring more outreach coordinators;
--Improving Youth Leadership Council program: creating a full-time coordinator position and providing youth and those who mentor youth with compensation for their work;
--Offering more resources and workshops for gardeners;
--Cultivating an awareness that increased support for community gardens does not entail increased regulation: community gardens are poorly served by top-down, uniform application of rules.