EPRA improves neighborhood food access by supporting neighborhood-led efforts in community food production and distribution. We manage three community gardens which collectively serve over 60 community gardeners (and growing!), acting as incubator spaces where gardeners improve their skills by learning from us and each other. We support an additional 20 community gardeners in their own spaces by lending labor, tools, supplies, and expertise as needed. We maintain a vegetable garden in partinership with Strawberry Mansion High School’s culinary arts program, where students learn to grow their own produce to use in the school’s commercial kitchen. We also maintain a children’s permaculture orchard with fruit trees and berry bushes, and we use our garden spaces for youth garden education with our afterschool and summer camp programs as well as informal groups of neighborhood youth.
In addition to the produce grown by community gardeners, which is shared with family and friends and often given away to neighbors, produce EPRA grows is distributed through our food cupboard, our weekly farmstand, and harvested by our neighbors as needed. We grow our produce exclusively using chemical-free, organic-method growing practices and encourage our community partners to do the same.