Looking Back and Looking Forward

Explosive Growth, Change, Loss, and the Struggles and Potential Ahead

It’s hard to believe we’re only a couple of weeks into the new year, and if you’ve already put 2025 in the rear-view mirror you’d not be alone, the pace of national and global events in the new year has indeed been intense. I had intended to get this post out back in December but one thing led to another and I pushed it off, for which I apologize. As is often the case when I fired off an email to the St. Elmo listserv back in the late summer of 2023 proposing a community food forest I could not have predicted how things would unfold over a mere two years, nor could I have firmly predicted (though I had my suspicions) how the wider political and cultural landscape would transform over the next couple of years.

Before I try to give a very partial overview of what all happened with the Chattanooga Food Forest Coalition over the course of 2025, let me say that while it has involved a great deal of work and difficulty and no small amount of frustration and disappointment, on the whole it has been beautiful and inspiring and absolutely invigorating. Seeing people from across the whole spectrum of class, ethnicity, backgrounds, beliefs, and other markers of identity come together in common tasks and mutual support and aid has been just wonderful, it’s the most vital aspect of what we are doing and what we want to do. Watching as people take responsibility for themselves, the land and other living things, and for the care and support of their neighbors, self-organizing and working shoulder to shoulder—few things are more powerful and more impactful. That this mutual work has also absolutely transformed pieces of land that were ecological wastelands until a year or two ago just makes it even more wonderful. The transformation and regeneration of human social relations and connections directly connects with the transformation and regeneration of the living earth itself. And we are just beginning—if the wider political environment in which we find ourselves looks, and is, dangerous and threatening and unpredictable, it is also one of possibility, outcomes are not foreclosed, our struggles and work and cooperation matter.

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So, what did 2025 look like for the Chattanooga Food Forest Coalition, and where maybe, are we going this year?

We began the year with a set of plans and expectations based on conditions in 2024, and watched as almost everything we had planned either collapsed or changed dramatically, thanks to national, local, and personal dynamics and contingencies. At the same time, even in the midst of very real difficulties, heartaches, and uncertainties, this has been an explosively productive year, over the course of which our work as the Chattanooga Food Forest Coalition and the wider sphere of urban and community agriculture has expanded and solidified. Multiple new sites were not just affiliated with our organization this year but started out from the ground up. We have reached hundreds if not thousands of people through a range of activities and offerings and on-the-ground interventions, and have laid the groundwork for full non-profit incorporation and more connected and coordinated work across Chattanooga and into its rural hinterlands, with an eye to larger food systems and ecological needs and possibilities. We’ve had some real losses, but at the same time those losses have been supplanted by gains.

Let me lead with the losses and setbacks, some of which were largely outside of our control, others of which we (by which I primarily mean me) probably could have avoided. One of the first losses was the suspension—temporary, as it turned out—of a major grant we had secured at the end of 2024, which, had it gone through when we had anticipated, would have probably moved us along to organizational stability faster. Because the grant had some connection to a Federal funding agency it was, like so many other such grants and sources of funding, suspended with the ascension of the new administration in Washington. From the start this required a reworking of our plans, though I will be honest when we got the news it was hardly a surprise, which made the bit of re-calibration necessary fairly easy.

Of a more unexpected nature, we suffered a severe setback early on in the year in relation to one of our first partner sites, Emma Wheeler Homes. Long and not very happy story short, our relationship with the Chattanooga Housing Authority hit the proverbial rocks over the course of the spring, leading to our being expelled from the two existing community garden and food forest projects on housing authority property; at the same time there seems to have been a more or less conscious choice on the part of the housing authority to de-emphasize and even roll back community agriculture projects on their land, for a range of reasons (including, most likely, redevelopment plans). To say this was frustrating would be an understatement: our team, outside volunteers, and resident gardeners of the two housing authority locations had invested a great deal of labor and resources into these growing spaces, particularly Emma Wheeler, only to see that work brought to naught. Particularly bitter was the loss of the venerable community greenhouse at Gateway Towers, as it has supplied many community gardens for years; it is, as far as we know, slated for destruction thanks to the Westside Redevelopment Project.

We learned many lessons as a result of the unraveling of what had been a productive relationship. While we had established good relationships within this particular agency, people moved within the agency and priorities changed. We did not pay close attention to the proverbial chain of command within the agency or cultivate relationships with all of the relevant parties (or even entirely know who all of the relevant parties were). We also tried to do more than, as it turned out, the housing authority was ready for anyone to do: our focus had been on gauging resident interest and support, without realizing how vital cultivating relationships with the various people in positions of power within the housing authority was.

While not a site we had been directly associated with, we’ve played a major role in the final chapter—for now—of the Neema Community Garden on Main Street. Founded a decade a half ago by an Episcopal priest, Fr. Peter, as part of his ministry to fellow migrants and refugees in Chattanooga, the garden was forced to close this year because the land it sits on is going to be developed. We responded to this loss by organizing successive teams of volunteers to relocate as much of the soil and concrete block as possible to other community agriculture sites, helping to start a new garden at First Christian Church and to greatly expand the beds managed by Hope Community Fridge at Ascension Lutheran. We are continuing to work to find new gardening homes for the displaced gardeners from Neema, with some success though there is much still to be done (and if you’re reading this and have land available in the vicinity of the east end of Main Street let us know!). The loss of this garden also underline for us the importance of policy solutions in securing land tenure for these kinds of projects, and towards that end we are exploring ideas like using community land trusts to protect community agricultural land and space in the future, as well as working very deliberately with government land owners to carve out zones of use.

Finally, we experienced the loss—through moving to that is—of one our core team members, Gabe Lepage, who moved back to Montana due to a pressing family concern; while he is continuing to participate to some degree in big-picture planning and strategy, obviously his ability to attend to day to day matters and do on the ground work is now gone. Gabe helped to organize the coalition into its current configuration, developed many relationships and connectivities around the city, and lent a great deal of knowledge in getting our initial sites up and running.

So much for losses and setbacks. They were outnumbered by all of the new sites with which we associated this last year, the expansive growth—literal and metaphorical—in terms of associated communities, individuals, and like-minded organizations. To give a couple of examples: at some point after our unceremonious expulsion from Emma Wheeler, we got in touch with the Alton Park Development Corporation, a small non-profit that operates a community center (among other things) out of what used to be the Piney Woods Elementary School, right across the street from the Emma Wheeler Homes community. Long story short, we’ve started helping them with their small existing gardens and added some ecological landscaping, with a goal of a couple of small fruit tree orchards; our interactions there have also led, among other things, to the relocation of the Seed Theater to the space, as well as an initiative by others in our network to start an urban farm at the site. It’s still a fluid situation, so to speak, but on the whole it really was a case of a window closing and a door opening.

We added relationships with several other sites, following our model of lending support as needed—whether that entails technical guidance, routing resources, organizing volunteer days, or whatever else within our capacity is possible. To give an example: early in 2025 we connected with someone looking to start a community garden in Flintstone, Georgia (just across the state line from the St. Elmo neighborhood of Chattanooga, and just down the road from my home), a garden that would directly support a food assistance network that had been operating for a few years out of a local church. Long story short, over the course of 2025 we formed a group of core workers, secured a site adjacent to the church (Chattanooga Valley Church of the Nazarene) and made the (literally) bare dirt bloom and fruit. The amount of work the community gardeners here have put in over the last several months, and the resources they’ve been able to secure, is just incredible, and deserves a separate write-up. The first season of production was predictably slim—the soil we were working with was exposed subsoil with almost no organic matter or biological activity initially—but by the fall we had a robust crop of greens, peas, and a few other things, which we were able to harvest and get to participants in the food network.

I could go on with stories of the various places we are now working, but this essay is already running quite long! Along with around a dozen locations with which we are directly involved—the Crabtree Farms community food forest being the most recent addition, with the first phase of revitalization work finishing up this morning—we have also cultivated relationships with other organizations and individuals doing similar work in and around Chattanooga, from the Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers to SEED Chattanooga to the Dalton-based Floating Tree to all of the creative workers who have offered their skills and imaginations for community agriculture support, along with quite a few other folks honestly too numerous to enumerate here, with other relationships in their initial phases right now. Supporting distributed networks and activity, building mutuality and cooperation, are crucial to our mission—and such work is not always easy, but it is very powerful, and leads to results that one organization or individual or community or neighborhood can not achieve on its own. And without going into great detail here, the current fraught political situation here in the United States, a situation that is unlikely to get better any time very soon, makes such network building and mutuality all the more vital.

I’ll devote a future newsletter edition to some of the things we are planning for later in the year—we’re still working on the details, and if you’ve made it this far you’re probably ready for me to wrap up anyway. As always, if you’d like to get involved in any capacity, please get in touch! Folks who can take on an organizing and self-governance capacity for existing community agriculture sites and communities are especially helpful, but even if there are no such sites in your immediate vicinity you can still be involved at the ground level in some way or another.

I do not expect this year to be an easy one, if I may be entirely honest; we are facing challenges at home and nation-wide that are genuinely unprecedented, and no one can predict where things are going to end up. But I really do believe that the sort of work we and our many allies and comrades in food forest and community garden arms have been doing makes a profound difference, not just in ecological restoration and healthy food production—as important as those are—but also in regenerating and building robust community, direct democracy, and interpersonal relationships with one another across potentially dividing lines.

Forward, together!