Current Campaigns

ADVOCACY ALERT: Let's Have Community Gardening in the U.S. Farm Bill

You can make a difference for getting more funding for community gardening in the United States. Our members of Congress need to know about community gardens and how they are feeding and improving the health of folks across the country. The U.S. Farm Bill is currently undergoing reauthorization in Congress. ACGA requests that community gardeners ask your members of Congress to co-sponsor two bills - one in the House and one in the Senate. To find your member of Congress, go to http://www.congress.org.

The bills are:

  • H.R. 2364 sponsored by Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Local Food and Farm Support Act
  • S. 1432 sponsored by Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and by Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Food for a Healthy America Act.

Both of these bills increase the funding for the Community Food Projects grant program and add funding for a new urban agriculture, including community gardening, grant program.

For the full text of the legislation, go to http://thomas.loc.gov and type in the bill numbers, including the H.R. and S.

Getting Community Gardening in the Farm Bill
For the past two years, ACGA has been participating in the Healthy Food and Community (HFC) work group, spearheaded by the Community Food Security Coalition (http://www.foodsecurity.org) of the Farm and Food Policy Project (FFPP) (http://www.farmandfoodproject.org), a Kellogg-funded initiative to make food system-friendly changes in the Farm Bill. This past January, over 400 organizations, including ACGA, signed on to a consensus position paper called Seeking Balance (http://www.farmandfoodproject.org/seeking_balance.asp) - see page 7 for mention of community gardening - the result of a major effort to get included! The HFC work group also produced its own consensus position http://www.foodsecurity.org/HFC%20Initiative.pdf, which promotes increased funding for urban agriculture, including community gardening. ACGA is particularly supportive of the effort to not only get increased funding for the Community Food Projects grant program, but to also new funding that will be specifically for community gardening.

ACGA is committed to working nationally on behalf of community gardens. You can download a copy of the letter ACGA sent to the House and Senate Agriculture Committees:

All ACGA members are encouraged to join the Advocacy Committee, which meets monthly on a toll-free conference call. To join the Committee, contact chair Bobby Wilson at 404-762-4077 or e-mail.