Alicia Pirani Brumfield, a Farm Educator and graduate of Growing Home’s program, walks a cart by the greenhouse.
Growing Home
What might we build after the world ends? It’s a question I’ve asked myself amid narratives that we’re careening towards catastrophe. I’ve lived the entirety of my conscious life in a post-911 world with an ever-present sense of collective doom, and I’m not unique among my peers. Perhaps every generation believes the world is on the cusp of either death or rebirth, with its own iteration of war and disaster.
And yet, there is always a remnant of the world that keeps surviving, that must figure out how to eat, where people will lay their heads, how they will pass the time. Growing Home is the kind of organization that asks, in the face of fatalism, what would it look like to resist despair? Based out of Englewood, it’s rooted in a community that has already experienced great hardship, and now real people with real lives must decide how to move forward. Not to be lost to existentialism, Growing Home responds to chaos with solutions, spurred by hope. Reduced to its essence, it’s quite simple: they grow food and they teach people how to grow food.
What it Takes to Grow Change
The late Les Brown founded Growing Home in 2002, originally a project birthed out of his other nonprofit, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Les was compelled by the need in the city and felt not enough was being done to equip the unhoused with opportunities to overcome their situations. The photos from two decades ago show barren, concrete lots and a beaming staff, already hopeful for what could be built from the nothingness. “If he was alive today, I think that he would be in tears to see how much this has grown and how much we’ve thrived,” Zenobia Williams, Director of Employment Training, shares.
The analogy of it all is so rich it would border on cliché if it wasn’t sincere. 20-some years on, the nonprofit is quite literally growing a solution to some of the neighborhood’s most pressing problems. On the once barren cement lots upon which Growing Home now sits, the organization has brought in raised beds, dirt, seedlings, greenhouses, and a small building for processing the fruits of their labor. Growing Home’s approach to community development centers restorative relationships for those on the fringes, such as returning citizens or the unhoused, meaningful employment that is both lucrative and fulfilling to the individual, and of course, food.