Winter Farm Work

Despite the recent snowy and cold weather in Denver, we’ve been busy getting our gardens and our urban farms ready for a productive growing season!

During February, AmeriCorps members helped Revision complete its greenhouse at Kepner Middle School – just in time to grow the more than 10,000 seedlings that Revision will plant and sell this spring!  The team also helped construct two new high-tunnel hoop houses at the Ubuntu Urban Farm, providing an additional 2000 square feet of protected growing space. These high-tunnels will extend our growing season by several months, and will also help protect crops during the summer. A special thanks to Mr. Michael Jeronimus for generously donating these hoop house materials – they will make all the difference.

We are excited for our first full growing season at the Ubuntu Farm, a collaboration with the Somali Bantu Development Council and Revision’s promotoras and other community partners. We will be producing food for the community while developing new economic opportunities as well. Both the Kepner Urban Farm and the Ubuntu Farm are cornerstones in developing food security and economic opportunity for southwest Denver.

Stay tuned for volunteer days, farm tours, sustainability classes, and farm dinners this year!

Cultivating Community, Planting Seeds

If you’ve followed our blog, you know that we have been starting seedlings in preparation for our upcoming gardening and farming season. This season is our biggest year yet as we plan on reaching 200 backyard gardens!

Only 4 short years ago, we launched Re:farm Denver and planted our first gardens – 7 of them to be exact. The success of our model is based on two key principles: (1) we support families to grow their own food by providing resources and ongoing technical support, and (2) we hire and train residents from the community to become promotoras and empower them to drive the program.

As we speak, promotoras are meeting one-on-one with families to explain the program and help them plan their gardens – what they want to eat, healthiest choices, and what is best suitable for their space. After promotoras complete a site visit and make a garden plan, we bring in nutrient-rich compost to feed and improve soil quality. We then help each family install a water efficient drip-irrigation system controlled with an automatic timer.  Later this spring, promotoras will deliver plants and seeds and help each family plant their garden!

New this year, Revision is excited to announce a limited number of gardens for sale!  We are exploring the concept of a “one-for-one” model where a family that can afford to pay for a garden will help offset the cost of a low-income family’s garden. 

Please check back for more information, or contact us here.

Fishing Poles

We are all familiar with the well-traveled parable: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”  But how often do we actually carry this out in the way that we view charity, the way that we approach cycles of poverty both locally and abroad?  This may be easy to do on a small scale, but how do we succeed in doing it on a broad scale? And even if you teach a man to fish, he cannot fish without a fishing pole.

We are intentional about teaching people to create their own ‘fishing poles’ – that is, creating the means and resources to provide for themselves and their communities.