Support the Community Food Forest at Leslie Park

The Community Food Forest at Leslie Park is a community resilience project on the Northside of Ann Arbor, Michigan created by the community, for the community. Our volunteer coalition is a stunningly beautiful group of people made up of a wide range of ages, races, cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic circumstances, genders, experience levels, and skill sets who generously work together to sustain this project and bring healthy food and a healthy environment to the wider community. This project is entirely community-funded and your support makes such a difference in fully realizing our vision!

Together we are simultaneously supporting ecological healing and reimagining ways to care for our communities. We hold a firm commitment to improving equity in truly essential areas of life: food distribution, access to land, resources, and education about growing your own food.

As an educational hub and demonstration site, the project provides many entirely free hands-on learning opportunities that help people to learn, firsthand, the many benefits of ecologically sound food production. Practices that demonstrate respect for the earth also help the people: they make it possible to grow more food in less space, simultaneously build habitat and biodiversity, actively sequester carbon, and bring food production closer to home (which has a huge impact on carbon footprint).

This is an entirely volunteer-run project where the needs of the community as a whole come first and foremost. It’s helpful to understand that a Food Forest is something beyond a community garden. While community gardens are also a vibrant and relevant contribution to healing the earth and building resilience through localization of food production, the food forest model emphasizes interdependence and care for the whole. At our small site, there are no individual plots that people tend exclusively for themselves and/or their families. Instead, we are creating a long-term, self-regulating food system that is put in place by the community, for the community, and will last for generations to come. All of the bounty that the Food Forest generates is available to the entire community. We are challenging food access inequities by having all of the work done by whoever is capable and making all of the harvest available to whoever needs it. This may seem like a small distinction, but for us, it is a powerful and necessary reimagining that shapes how we care for each other as a community, a city, and a world.

At this point, we are asking for help covering the cost of materials to get us through this season. While all labor is volunteered and many generous community members have come forward to donate young plants, seeds, and some necessary materials, there is a lot that goes into sustaining the project. In order to allow this project to be the thriving food source and educational hub it is growing into, we’re asking for help from our broader community to cover the costs for materials for this next stage of installation and maintenance: soil amendments, building materials, garden tools, and some of the perennial plants necessary to move the project along.

Thank you for your support, learn more here, or come out and see us some time!

Sincerely,

The Community Food Forest Coalition