Signature Projects

“When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.”

- George Washington Carver

Growing Equity from the Ground Up will establish an urban gardening and farming training program to prepare community leaders to advance equity. The project aims to become the premiere national site for developing expert gardeners and farmers who are cross-trained in the knowledge and skills needed to make sustainable, healthy food production the foundation for strategic and comprehensive interventions that address the multiple interconnected economic, employment, educational, environmental, health, and nutritional challenges facing urban communities.

Apprentices will learn to transform urban communities literally from the ground up, taking direction for building healthy and sustainable communities by restoring the fertility of the land, growing and distributing organic food in an ecologically and economically sustainable way, and living a healthy lifestyle. Growing Equity from the Ground Up will not simply create the nation’s most comprehensive urban garden and farm network and urban ecological horticulture program, but it will leverage the resources of its graduates and affiliated organizations to untangle the policy knots that bind responses to the many problems undermining the wellbeing of urban communities.

"We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community."

-Cesar Chavez

The Central California Young Adult Civic Engagement (YACE) Project will establish a Community Leaders Fellowship program for young adults recruited from low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse communities from the eastern border of the San Joaquin valley across to the central coast of Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito counties. This often-neglected region has many shared demographic, economic, and social characteristics that can be mobilized to access a high level of latent political power that can be strategically deployed to meet the pressing needs of these communities.

YACE was developed through an in-depth, two-year long collaborative process facilitated by the University of California Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC). Three research centers and more than 20 community organizations participated in analyzing the needs and strengths in the region and developing YACE as a strategic intervention to create more equitable communities. Beginning with a two-year pilot phase, the YACE Fellowship Program is aimed at increasing the civic engagement of 18-30 year olds in the Central California region by preparing a new generation of Community Leaders with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to bridge social, cultural, and economic divides, to utilize data and research in organizing efforts, and to foster healthy, caring, and sustainable communities. At the same time, YACE will enhance the capacity of key community-based organizations to educate and mobilize community members typically left out of public deliberations and policy formation about issues of central importance to their wellbeing.