Since 1973, we have partnered with community gardeners.
Our core values.
Community Building.
Community gardeners build and sustain communities, creating gathering places for food growing, healing, art, activism, and many forms of collective care.
Food Justice.
Community gardeners are vital members of a larger movement towards food sovereignty, and have long been working vigorously for the right to healthy, fresh, culturally relevant food.
Youth Empowerment.
Meaningful employment for BIPOC youth, engaged in food justice work is essential. We aim to engage youth in all aspects of Green Guerillas, with youth active as participants and eventually as staff, mentors, and board advisory committee members. Beyond Green Guerillas, we want to empower youth to make a broad and lasting impact on food justice and urban agriculture in New York City.
Interdependence.
Our work finds purpose and depth in the connections between people and the Earth.
Environmental Justice.
Community gardening is a powerful response to environmental racism, as community gardens help to mitigate the effects of pollution that disproportionately impact low-income neighborhoods, harming Black and Latinx people. Further, community gardens support biodiversity and act as essential infrastructure in fighting climate crisis.
Collective Land Work & Care.
We support community stewardship of the land and acknowledge the Indigenous peoples including the Munsee Lenape, Canarsie, Lekawe, and Wappinger on whose land we now work, live, plant and harvest.
We stand for equity.
We acknowledge the many barriers and biases facing BIPOC, women, immigrants, LGBTQIA+, those in poverty and other groups who have faced oppression. These barriers and biases have deep, systemic roots in white supremacy, xenophobia, misogyny, and elitism, among other systems of oppression. We stand against these systems and we recognize that working to overcome and dismantle them requires active effort.
We commit to actively advancing equity in our programming and leadership. As part of our efforts, we will:
Work to dismantle any inequities within our systems and programs; honestly examine how systemic inequities impact our work and strive to address them equitably, in a mission-focused way.
Practice transparent communication.
Commit time and resources to expand more diverse leadership within our board and staff.
Commit to continued anti-racist trainings and practices.
This will be an ongoing process, and we recognize that we might not get it right all the time. When we make mistakes, we promise to to learn and do better and to be accountable to the communities we serve.
We hold that our differences — in race, gender identity, sexual orientation, heritage, tradition, and experience — strengthen our work. Diversity, inclusion, and equity are deeply connected to the Green Guerillas mission. They are essential for the well-being of the communities we serve as well as the well-being of our staff, volunteers, youth interns and board.