Council on the Environment, Inc.

Our overall goal is to help New Yorkers flourish. We do this by providing essential services and take action to make NYC a truly livable city, one where every person can enjoy a healthier, more sustainable life.

In order to accomplish our goal, we pair education with action for any New Yorker who is interested (currently some 3,000,000 New Yorkers take advantage of our programs and services). That means anyone who participates in our programs can learn about environmental issues and THEN utilize opportunities we provide to take sustainable actions.

Strategies:
• Creating Food Access and Preserving Farmland: We will operate our network of 80+ Greenmarkets, Farmstands, and Fresh Food Box sites, as well as GrowNYC Wholesale, ensuring that all New Yorkers have access to the freshest, local food, reducing food miles and preserving ensure thousands of acres of farmland.

• Encouraging Waste Reduction and Conserving Resources: We will blanket the five boroughs with resources like textile and food scrap collection to make waste reduction easy for all.

• Creating Open Space and Beautifying Neighborhoods: We will build new community gardens, renovate existing green spaces, and support hundreds of existing community and school gardens with: volunteer days, garden builds, horticulture workshops, mini-grants for schools, teacher training, and our wholesale plant sale.

• Hands-on Environmental Education: We will foster future environmental stewards by providing thousands of children each year with in-person and virtual programs that provide for many their first meaningful interaction with the natural environment, from field trips to our teaching garden on Governors Island to our career readiness program.

We bring to every project nearly 5 decades of experience. GrowNYC builds sustainability into all our programs and projects – it is a core principle for the organization. We believe that providing programming, amenities and assistance is always done in partnership with others: neighborhoods, community groups, fellow nonprofits, individuals, schools, city agencies, etc. When we commit resources granted by funders, it is incumbent upon us to ensure that we invest in projects that are optimized for success and longevity. Therefore, we have developed metrics/success determinants that allow us to evaluate whether all necessary elements are in place before deploying resources to a project e.g. community garden assistance requires that the garden have land permanency, a committed cadre of members, public open hours, a set of agreed upon rules/standards for use, etc. Additionally, GrowNYC is not a ‘cut and run’ organization; we are available for our constituents and partners to answer questions, troubleshoot and provide additional resources e.g. we run regular grant writing workshops for our school gardeners so that they are equipped to seek and raise funds beyond the assistance we provide. GrowNYC embodies the ‘teach a man to fish’ ethos so that community projects have staying power and community members are empowered to steward those projects. We are proud that for nearly a half century, the vast majority of our program sites i.e. Greenmarkets, community gardens, school partners, etc. endure and withstand the test of time as they have become woven into neighborhoods as well loved and needed community hubs.

GrowNYC is and will continue to grow as a resource for any New Yorker who wants to lower their environmental impact by taking advantage of tools, services and information to inform choices and action.
GrowNYC operated the first modern day farmers market in NYC starting in 1978 and now is proud to manage the largest outdoor farmers market program in the U.S. Beyond our 65 vibrant hubs, we are improving food access and health via: Farmstands, Fresh Food Box (think CSA without the commitment) and our Food Hub, a distribution project that gets food in wholesale quantities to restaurants, food rescue organizations, bodegas and more. Our gardening program was at the forefront of the movement in New York and was founded by Richard Abrons and Liz Christy—considered the founder of the community gardens movement—to transform vacant lots into communal green spaces and our rainwater harvesting program collects one million gallons of water annually. We have worked with residents to build 135+ gardens and each year we help hundreds more through our wholesale plant sales, volunteer days, green infrastructure builds, plant material donations, and renovations.

The groundwork has been laid and we've made great progress over the past 50 years – in the future we'd like to grow our presence in the minds and practices of all new Yorkers and nonprofits – who can look to us as a partner and as a go-to source for what they might need. We hope to weave sustainability into every component of city life so that being green is second nature. In order to strengthen our efforts even more, we hope to continue to build on key partnerships, e.g. the NYC Park's Department, the botanical gardens and other citywide groups that can help leverage resources, staff and funding.