20 First St
Unit B
Rochester, NY 14605

Taproot Collective

Taproot designs and supports shared urban greenspaces and the programming that unlocks its potential for food sovereignty, youth employment, environmental justice, community building, and racial equity. Our mission is to design and build holistic systems for healthy local food and educational opportunities with youth and families. In 2022 we began transitioning from an entirely volunteer-led organization to a staff-led model by hiring our first full-time Executive Director and our first full-time year-round program staff. Since our founding in 2017, our work centers on the expansion of environmental justice and food access in marginalized communities through youth workforce development, professional and technical support for community organizations, educational programming, and advocacy for sound policy. Taproot’s services are provided through three interconnected pillars: The Collective, Community Food Team, and First Market Farm. The Collective, launched in 2022, is a free membership program designed to address the needs of community gardeners in the city of Rochester. Since critical and sufficient resources can be difficult to access, The Collective offers members a range of material and technical support through a tiered menu of services. Services include design-build, fiduciary, and logistical support, and provision of gardening materials. Participation in The Collective can culminate in bringing a community garden into the City Roots Community Land Trust to secure it as a permanent, community-controlled asset. During The Collective’s inaugural year, we distributed over $25,000 of gardening materials to community gardens, and in 2023, we will invest nearly $100,000 in material, labor, and in-kind support in over 50 gardens and farms in Rochester. The Community Food Team (CFT) offers high quality youth employment opportunities that focus on organic food production and entrepreneurship rooted in environmentally regenerative and socially responsible practices. The CFT summer program includes several youth positions: Youth Interns (ages 14-15), Peer Leaders (for returning graduates of our summer program, ages 16 and up), and Team Leaders (ages 18-25). This program translates the material, program, and policy needs of Rochester’s urban agriculture community into concrete learning goals and job skills training. Our youth employees gain community engagement, project management, and leadership skills training, and exposure to career paths in organic landscaping, carpentry, and agriculture. The Community Food Team installs critical capacity-building improvements and infrastructure at gardens and farms that are members of The Collective. In 2023, we employed 17 low-income Youth Interns and 2 Team Leader interns, and plan to fill 30-40 positions in 2024 and up to 60 in 2025. First Market Farm (FMF) is an urban teaching and production garden, collocated with our office, that occupies a once-vacant lot across the street from Rochester’s thriving Public Market. A living classroom, FMF is the homebase for all of our youth employment and educational programming, including our Community Garden Manager Workshops and a school gardening professional development series for Rochester City School Teachers. First Market Farm features regenerative and organic farming methods, and produces over 1,000 pounds of food a year that we distribute directly to our neighbors.

We focus on: The Environment, Education

Where we are: Monroe


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