While Milwaukee had never made urban agriculture illegal, as many other cities had, gardening activities were still technically constrained in the industrially zoned areas with most of the large vacant lots, so the land use policy task force worked to get the zoning laws changed. Under Wiggins’ leadership, MUG was also able to negotiate longer leases for many of the gardens in its network located on city-owned lots. Longer leases didn’t mean preservation, but for gardeners, having assured access to a site for three years rather than one season at a time increased motivation to invest time and labor into the space and its soil. In its early years, MUG struggled to gain legitimacy as a land trust, but in the process of networking with other organizations and engaging with the public, the organization gradually shifted its goals and eventually gained legitimacy by meeting needs more salient to the community. While MUG was trying to gain legitimacy as a land trust, building its local brand through media coverage, events and advertisements, the organization began to receive requests for different kinds of garden support. Gardeners at existing sites wanted help with maintenance, and some people sought MUG’s help finding or starting a garden near them. As raising large enough sums to purchase land was proving difficult, the organization reoriented its activities toward providing technical support and education about gardening to bolster the function of a growing network of self-organized gardens, grow rack influencing land-use policy and planning, and eventually managing leases with the city for gardens on city-owned parcels. In 2013, MUG’s shift from garden preservation to garden support was solidified by their merger with Groundwork Milwaukee, an organization centered on environmental programming activities and job training for at-risk youth.
The two organizations had been sharing office space with other nonprofit groups at the Milwaukee Environmental Consortium, and they collaborated on projects such as installing a cistern and solar pump for sustainable water access at a MUG-owned garden in 2011. Seeing how much their activities were aligned, the organizations’ leaders decided to join MUG with Groundwork Milwaukee in order to save money on overhead. As MUG’s 2012 annual report explained, “The BIG NEWS for the upcoming year is an agency merger with our sister organization, Groundwork Milwaukee. The anticipated merger will allow MUG to be MORE EFFECTIVE and produce efficiencies that will grow more and better gardens throughout Milwaukee’s neighborhoods” . When the two organizations merged in 2013, and MUG became a program of Groundwork Milwaukee, Antoine Carter had been working as the Membership and Outreach Manager for Groundwork Milwaukee. Since 2011, Carter had coordinated youth activities such as running a young farmers’ CSA and building infrastructure for local community gardens. When Carter became the Program Manager for MUG shortly after the merger, he brought with him the experiences of garden-based youth development and community engagement, plus the perspective of someone who had grown up in the disadvantaged Near North Side of Milwaukee—a first for the organization’s leadership. In 2014, at a University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee panel discussion on “Home and Garden: Can Urban Agriculture Save our Neighborhoods?” Carter introduced MUG as “Milwaukee’s best kept secret” and detailed examples of the gardens that Groundwork Milwaukee was helping to install, explaining how these various sites were transforming their neighborhoods—bringing different groups together in one space, healing community trauma, and inspiring young men like him .
Under Carter’s leadership, MUG continued to coordinate garden leases and help residents start new gardens, while placing a greater emphasis on community engagement and programming—especially activities and job training opportunities for Groundwork Milwaukee’s “Green Team” of paid youth work crews. While MUG had struggled to gain legitimacy as a land trust, the organization found a meaningful role providing garden support and event programming; in the effort to maintain this legitimacy over time, MUG amplified a particular narrative around the benefits of urban agriculture in Milwaukee. Once MUG merged with Groundwork Milwaukee, leveraging public funding and grant sources to employ youth in garden maintenance and service-learning activities became a core function of the program. In its grant applications, media statements and newsletters, the program highlighted the benefits of urban agriculture as a tool for youth development and economic opportunity. MUG was also involved in community building activities, but it did not emphasize these in public communications as much as the youth and employment aspects. Ultimately, while community building remained core to MUG’s work, the framing focused on youth and jobs aligned well with that of other prominent nonprofit organizations in the city that engaged in urban growing, which will be discussed more below.Milwaukee Urban Gardens began by emphasizing its role in defending local gardens from the threat of development and thereby improving quality of life for Milwaukee residents, but this narrative never gained traction , so MUG’s focus shifted over time toward community programming, youth education, and employment as the program gained legitimacy for these activities and systematized its operations in order to maintain that legitimacy.
MUG’s mission continued to be about improving quality of life for Milwaukee residents, but the understanding of how to fulfill that mission evolved from securing permanent gardens to enriching the social life of garden spaces. Having been unable to successfully gain legitimacy for the work of preserving gardens, MUG was concomitantly unable to legitimize urban agriculture as a permanent land use, and today, most of Milwaukee’s community gardens are still vulnerable to development. MUG’s efforts have contributed to longer leases for many of the city-owned garden sites, and increased tenure promotes increased time investment by gardeners who maintain the sites. MUG has undoubtedly helped legitimize urban agriculture in Milwaukee by building a narrative around their value for youth and employment training and by providing the administrative infrastructure that affords gardeners and garden sites more continuity, greenhouse grow tables but this legitimacy does not invoke permanence. Furthermore, some of the lots that MUG purchased opportunistically in its early years are not active as gardens anymore, and they actually pose a slight burden to the organization in terms of property taxes and upkeep. Paradoxically, these empty sites may serve as symbols of urban agriculture’s temporary nature despite being acquired with the goal of permanence. Today, Groundwork Milwaukee engages with city officials regularly in managing leases and water permits for various gardens, but the organization does not appear to be actively pushing for longer land tenure for the sites in its network or mobilizing gardeners to achieve more favorable urban agriculture policy. Two factors that help explain why Groundwork Milwaukee doesn’t emphasize gardener organizing are the local civic conventions, which will be discussed more in chapter 3, and the wider organizational context of urban agriculture in Milwaukee. As noted above, MUG was not the first organization to oversee community gardens in Milwaukee; it was also not the most prominent in legitimizing and advocating for urban agriculture in the city. That distinction goes to Growing Power, a nonprofit urban farm with national renown. Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen, along with the leaders of other nonprofits such as Walnut Way, has played a large role in shaping the city’s relationship with urban agriculture. Allen started Growing Power in 1993, and as the organization grew it increasingly focused on addressing problems in its near north-side neighborhood by engaging at-risk youth and offering jobs to hard-to-employ people such as those with a criminal record, all in order to sell fresh produce affordably. Along with his innovative aquaponic growing techniques, this model earned Allen significant awards, including a Ford Leadership for a Changing World award in 2005 and a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008. As noted above, in addition to Growing Power and MUG, other local organizations have contributed to the legitimacy of and appreciation for urban agriculture as a land use in Milwaukee. The Walnut Way Conservation Corporation, a community development corporation focused on revitalizing the Lindsay Heights neighborhood on Milwaukee’s Near North Side, has also elevated the status of urban agriculture locally. Beginning in the 1990s, founders Sharon and Larry Adams organized the installation of community gardens and orchards at the request of neighborhood residents, who wanted to grow peaches and do something positive with vacant lots. From this network of agricultural spaces, Walnut Way now sells produce, canned goods, and value-added products to Milwaukee residents and restaurants. They employ youth and formerly incarcerated people in landscaping as well as agriculture and food production, providing job training and economic development while transforming the physical appearance of the neighborhood.
As with MUG and Growing Power, Walnut Way has maintained legitimacy in part by its emphasis on job training, which has further solidified the local understanding of urban agriculture as beneficial for its workforce development potential. Another organization often mentioned as a source of legitimacy for urban agriculture in Milwaukee is Victory Gardens Initiative . Since 2009, VGI has organized an annual “garden blitz” during which hundreds of volunteers install up to 500 gardens in backyards across Milwaukee and some of its suburbs. They also manage a 1.5-acre urban farm in the Harambee neighborhood on Milwaukee’s Near North Side. After VGI had leased their farm space for four years through the MUG program, they were able to purchase the parcel from the city—one of only a handful of such cases in which the city sold land for permanent nonprofit-run urban agriculture. In 2013, during the public hearing for the proposed land sale, Alderman Milele Coggs, whose district includes the land in question, called VGI’s farm “great work that’s been done that’s helped the neighborhood and that is a shining example of what can be done with green space in urban areas” . The farm includes an orchard and scale production beds for sale to restaurants and for free distribution to the local community. There is also a community gathering space on the site, along with individual garden plots available for interested community members. VGI uses the site to grow and distribute a significant amount of organic produce, but according to an employee interviewed, their primary mission is actually related to education: they teach neighborhood children, youth in service-learning programs, and other volunteers about organic food production. Yet again, a primary strategy that this organization has used to attract resources and sustain itself over time has to do with youth development, further legitimizing urban agriculture as a vehicle for job training. Walnut Way and VGI are organizations that operate well-known community gardens as a vehicle to fulfill their larger missions, and these organizations have garnered a great deal of media coverage and local recognition for urban agriculture even though it is only one component of their work. The UW Milwaukee County Extension has also operated a network of community gardens since 1978, as noted above; this program, too, has received a lot of positive press coverage, especially in its early years. Over time, the program has tended to operate more on county land outside the city limits, but as a partner to other organizations in the city it has still formed an important part of the local urban agriculture milieu. The situation in Philadelphia is different, in part due to differences in the history of how community gardens have been supported. While gaining legitimacy was a major challenge for Milwaukee Urban Gardens, the same was not true for Philadelphia’s main garden organization. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society had nearly 150 years of history and a well developed reputation by the time it established the Philadelphia Green program in 1973. The organization’s leader at the time, Ernesta Ballard, is described by many as a visionary; she certainly helped the organization maintain its relevance in changing times when she pushed for the creation of Philadelphia Green. Long known for producing the Philadelphia Flower Show and providing a venue for suburban socialites to show off their horticultural panache, PHS ventured in a different direction with Philadelphia Green by helping urban residents build gardens on vacant lots. In 1978, explaining why PHS was spending $100,000 from its operating budget on the Philadelphia Green program, Ballard explained, “Our people love the program because it gets rid of their guilt about the inner city… It allows them to help people” . This statement reveals a foundational truth about the Philadelphia Green program: the critical audience from which organization leaders sought legitimacy was the PHS donor base rather than the urban gardeners.