A Transition for Philly Rooted

We are incredibly sad to inform you that Philly Rooted will no longer be involved with the Walnut Hill Community Farm in West Philadelphia.  As many of you know, since 2009 we have designed, built and managed the Walnut Hill Community Farm and Grower’s Cooperative, in partnership with The Enterprise Center CDC.  Philly Rooted has engaged many partners and community members and provided locally grown, healthy food to the Walnut Hill community, in addition to part time jobs for local residents.  As many of you also know, we developed this project in a volunteer capacity while juggling our jobs and lives.  Although we had at many points asked for compensation for our work from The Enterprise Center, we were told that was not feasible.  Regardless, we continued to build this project and came to the realization that building this project and supporting the community was going to be a labor of love.

With this in mind, we have been developing strategies to move on to other projects by passing this farm on to someone who could manage the land and continue the experiment of entrepreneurial urban agriculture that we conceived there.  However, our plans were drastically altered when we learned this week that The Enterprise Center has offered employment to one of our volunteers to manage the Walnut Hill Community Farm, without our input.  This bizarre move on their part removes us from the decision-making process and ignores our partnership, institutional knowledge and ethic of cooperative labor on this piece of land.

In light of this development, we are stepping down from all of our involvement with the Walnut Hill Community Farm.  This decision causes us an immense amount of pain, but we continue to be excited about our work growing and greening the City of Philadelphia.  We plan to continue this work, so stay tuned to to find out what’s next for Philly Rooted.