Lots of Opportunity: Incorporating a Reentry Initiative into the Philadelphia LandCare Program

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The Philadelphia LandCare (PLC) program stabilizes and maintains vacant land in underserved neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia and currently manages over 16 million square feet of land. The LandCare “Clean and Green” stabilization treatment includes clearing out vacant lots, planting grass and trees, installing post-and-rail fencing, and maintaining sites twice per month. Through the Community LandCare program, PLC works with 18 community organizations, who hire over 100 local residents to perform landscape maintenance work. This year, PLC has developed a new Reentry Initiative. Through this program, PLC landscape contractors and community organizations hired and trained 30 ex-offenders to perform landscape maintenance services in their communities, adding over 2,000 new vacant parcels to the PLC inventory. To ensure success, PHS has partnered with RISE, the city’s reintegration services provider, to vet new hires and provide ongoing support services. This session will present a new reentry model and demonstrate how using vacant lots to create job opportunities can improve neighborhoods in Philadelphia, build capacity, and directly impact local residents.

Growing, Green, and Equitable: Practices and Policies to Support Community Gardening and Urban Agriculture

The community gardening and urban agriculture movement in urban areas across the United States has been rapidly expanding and changing. Programs like the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Harvest and NYC Community Garden Coalition’s Gardens Rising reuse blighted and vacant lots as vehicles for mitigating food insecurity and increasing the quality of life for residents through green space and gardening or employment opportunities. Policy is catching up to the trend with zoning and other ordinances to support urban greening and gardening, such as the Los Angeles Food Policy Council’s Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone (UAIZ) , enabled by a recent state policy change. These supportive policies can help protect precious community green spaces and can help maximize urban agriculture’s feasibility and resulting positive impacts. In this panel you will learn about what New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are doing to address equitable access to vacant properties in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods and to empower residents to reclaim these spaces to improve community health.

Experimental Fields: Water Quality, Vacant Land, and Community Revitalization

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Baltimore, like other cities across the country, faces converging issues of struggling communities, numerous vacant properties, and poor water quality in the streams, rivers, and bays that should be neighborhood assets, but aren’t. Finding solutions requires being open to experimentation. This panel will showcase municipal, nonprofit, community, academic, and federal organizations that are experimenting with project implementation, research, and/or planning at the intersection of water quality, vacant land, and community revitalization in Baltimore. Participants will learn about Baltimore City Growing Green Initiative and MS4 Permit as a framework for action, the “Peace Park,” a community led park project that fosters inclusion in a healthy way for all by dedicating activities to peace, and “Deep Blue,” a public and nonprofit collaboration that uses a community-based process to explore green infrastructure in five neighborhoods. They’ll also learn about a University of Maryland native meadow study that increases plant diversity and water absorption and the U.S. Forest Service’s Baltimore Ecosystem Study. This moderated discussion will highlight how these organizations are working individually and collaboratively, lessons learned, and how these projects can guide future approaches for reclaiming vacant land.