Tell City Park: Save Grow Dat!
City Park Conservancy
City Park Conservancy (CPC) is planning to bulldoze Grow Dat to build a road. They claim that their Master Plan for the park’s future will be determined by what the New Orleans community wants, but the CPC is already making moves that would kick Grow Dat off its farm. Join us in telling the CPC that New Orleans wants Grow Dat right where it is.
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To:
City Park Conservancy
From:
[Your Name]
As concerned friends, alumni and supporters of Grow Dat Youth Farm, we stand united in support of Grow Dat and demand that City Park Conservancy publicly commit to preserving the organization’s current farm and home in City Park. Additionally, we ask that CPC enshrine its commitment in a 25+ year lease to ensure Grow Dat has long-term security in the park.
Since 2011, Grow Dat Youth Farm has played a unique role in City Park and our community, providing a safe space, education and employment to a diverse group of young people from across New Orleans. We are therefore deeply concerned to hear that plans are being made without input from Grow Dat’s community or other key stakeholders to build a road through the park and displace Grow Dat.
Bulldozing Grow Dat Youth Farm would destroy a primary point of connection for hundreds of young people and their families. Grow Dat runs programming for 1,400 K-12 students and employs 70 teens every year, 70% of whom are youth of color, and welcomes thousands of other visitors for a wide range of educational, cultural and agricultural programs. Eliminating this precious and rare community space would directly harm the young people of color and their communities that hold Grow Dat dear, reducing access in City Park, and in turn making the park’s user base whiter, wealthier and older—in direct opposition to City Park Conservancy’s stated goals.
Building a road through Grow Dat, the largest urban farm in New Orleans, would also eliminate access to 50,000 pounds of locally grown food for the community per year. In a city with historically inequitable access to healthy food, Grow Dat’s program connects community members to locally grown produce in a centrally located, public space. It’s the kind of project City Park Conservancy should be putting at the center of its plans for the future—not demolishing.
The proposed road is not in the interest of the City Park Conservancy’s stated goals of improving access or the interest of the people the Park is meant to serve—the people of New Orleans. We urge City Park Conservancy to immediately change course and work with youth and other Grow Dat stakeholders to understand the needs and interests of our community and create an alternative plan for developing the northern side of City Park that preserves this vital institution.