Urbanstead develops pathways to success for tomorrow's leaders through urban farming.
Urbanstead provides youth with development, experience, and training in customer service and relations, public speaking, business management, outreach marketing, and group and individual presentations, as well as specialized skills in food literacy and urban farming techniques that drive youth to expand their interests and experience new workforce options. Through an innovative collaboration with community partners and local businesses, we are developing a successful system that creates jobs and healthy futures for generations.
Urbanstead Programs
Seed to Harvest
Seed to Harvest (S2H) works with young adults, ages 16-21, to provide critical career, emotional, and life skill-building experiences. These goals are accomplished by youth operating farmers' markets, teaching educational workshops, growing healthy organic food, and developing professionally. Youth receive extensive training in urban agriculture techniques while developing valuable entrepreneurial and employment skills in team collaboration, project planning, organization, budgeting, business planning, customer service, time management, networking, and more. Beyond professional skill building, participants are provided access to a safe environment out of school, leading to improved mental health and well-being. Through the workshop component of this program, participants learn how to lead and facilitate teaching events at local libraries and businesses. Youth not only develop leadership skills and build confidence, but also reach a wider community across the city through educational programming.
Youth Plots
Youth Plots (YP) is a hands-on service learning program that partners with local youth organizations and school partners. Participants learn about garden planning and construction, weeding techniques, pest management, proper farm tool use, harvesting techniques, composting, and nutrition from the garden, in addition to social responsibility and health literacy. Participants are encouraged to take home produce grown at our farms to teach their friends, neighbors, and families about urban farming techniques incorporated in growing local produce, thereby sharing the knowledge gained with their communities. Urbanstead was created because urban youth are not provided the chance to understand their place within the food ecosystem, as well as fully understand how food arrives at their table every night. Urbanstead knows that by increasing these experiences, young people will not only improve their emotional, physical, and mental health, but will also be prepared to better understand their world and their community.
Our History
Urbanstead’s Origin
Philadelphia was the first large city Urbanstead’s Executive Director and Founder, Lisa Gaidanowicz lived in. She moved here in 2008, just a few days before her 30th birthday, with the realization that her life needed a substantial change. At the time, she was unaware just how immense that change would ultimately be.
Lisa’s became involved in the IT field at an early age. After multiple college attempts, she realized sitting in a classroom was not the way she learned. She ended up following a career in system administration and worked for a handful of non-profit organizations before moving to Philadelphia. Soon after her move, she found work at a local non-profit GED organization. While there, she helped develop a program that utilized technology and gamification to increase career and college opportunities for students attaining their GEDs. It was then that she fell in love with teaching, realized she had a natural talent for connecting with young adults and realized working with people who wanted to be catalysts for positive change in the world was her calling.
However, there was a problem. Lisa never earned a college degree. She had the necessary hours needed for a degree but no piece of paper to show for it. When after four years of teaching, it came time to find a new place to work, she had a difficult time getting the job she wanted because she did not have that crucial piece of paper. She began to think about all of the students in Philadelphia that she had worked with who did not have the advantages she did and realized that there needed to be a better way to define success and ability than what current society standards stated was necessary. She began to dream.
Having grown up in rural New England, surrounded by small farms, Lisa always felt there was a strong connection between gardens, growing food and our ability to lead healthy and happy lives. She realized that she could utilize the platform of urban farming in the same way she had previously used technology to help guide young Philadelphians towards successful, happy and fulfilling futures. One afternoon, while sitting in a coffee shop discussing her dream, there was a person eavesdropping who would help make Lisa’s dream a reality.
The Francisville Urban Farm
Penelope Jordan, Executive Director and Founder of The Francisville Neighborhood Development Corporation happened to be sitting at the table next to Lisa and was listening intently to the conversation. She invited Lisa to see a space she had been working on in Francisville to turn into an urban farm. Lisa and Penny instantly connected and FNDC took Urbanstead under its wing in fiscal sponsorship. At the same time, Penny introduced Lisa to Eric Daniels, a young man from Northeast Philly who had been working with FNDC since his early teens. Together, with support from FNDC, Lisa and Eric started to build the farm into a space to safely host youth and community throughout Philadelphia.
In 2015, Urbanstead received it’s very first grant award from The Douty Foundation. Urbanstead used this money to build raised beds at The Francisville Urban Farm. On March 21st, 2015, in 4 inches of snow, more than Philadelphians of all ages and backgrounds, came together to help build 7 large raised beds at the farm and fill them with soil.
Since building the beds in 2015, The Francisville Urban Farm has also become home to Philadelphia’s first Passive Solar Greenhouse, a small shed, a large vermicomposting (composting with worms) system and an educational space with tents and picnic tables. Between 2015 and 2019 Urbanstead has hosted over 1500 youth and their families for hands on volunteer experiences in our soil, educational maker workshops, and provided thousands of pounds of fresh fruit, vegetables and plants to the public through Farmer’s Markets and community donations.
