Feed Denver: Urban Farms & Markets is a non-profit education and development organization created to empower local-level economic independence through sustainable small-scale farms and markets in urban settings. Feed Denver projects create new models of sustainable urban food production that impact food security for the most vulnerable. We hire our farm staff from the communities surrounding the farms. We partner with Denver refugee services agencies and other social service agencies to provide urban farming work experience programs. 

Started in 2008, Feed Denver is a project of the Colorado Nonprofit Development Center, a designated 501(c)3. Feed Denver excelled in its first years of operation, creating a network of collaborating organizations proficient in production, business, and education. Will Allen, 2008 MacArthur Fellow, and his organization, Growing Power, recognized Feed Denver as Growing Power’s Regional Outreach Training Center of the Rocky Mountain Region in 2009. We collaborate with regional universities on high-altitude growing demonstrations, research, and teaching. Our long-term sustainability goal, however, is inherent in our innovative micro-loan program that ensures future revenues through repayment from former Feed Denver farmers, who will eventually take control of our farms, one by one, and become self-sufficient entrepreneurs.

Feed Denver offers a powerful solution to a multitude of critical social issues. Urban farms hold the potential to provide universal access to fresh, high-quality healthy food throughout urban environments, repair declining or broken economies, build urban quality of life, and foster the physical and mental health of city dwellers neighborhood by neighborhood, empowering local-level economic independence through small urban farm businesses.

These businesses can offer sustainable economic opportunities, education, and training for aspiring entrepreneurs, youth, women, minorities, the undereducated, and the unemployed or underemployed. Urban farms embody economic stimulus at the grass roots level. They represent the potential for a local, rewarding, and accessible livelihood for many whose urban environments currently provide little opportunity, and for whom success seems impossible to achieve.

...Producing food in the city would bring fresh food directly into our communities and homes. Food grown near where we live will be more transparent leading to deeper understanding of production that is good, clean and fair. Learning the skills of farming in the city will create a new labor force. Developing city-appropriate, low-carbon-use farming techniques will create new green businesses. Food production buildings will secure year-round fresh food availability. And creating these businesses in communities, in neighborhoods, and on main streets will re-establish our relationship and responsibility with feeding ourselves."  Read more...

Lisa Rogers, Executive Director
Silvana Hoitt, Director of Refugee Programs
Ariel Chesnutt, Director of Production