Submitted by Sean Conroe. Sean Conroe lives in Seattle, Washington where he founded Alleycat Acres in January 2010. On top of spending hours on end getting dirty, Sean is also a student at Seattle Central Community College and an intern with the online media group, Worldchanging.
Earlier this year, eleven strangers came together to make a simple idea a reality: to create a network of urban farms on underused spaces within the city — where produce would be distributed by bicycle back into the surrounding neighborhood.
The group first came together on Jan. 25, 2010, to establish the groundwork for what would become Alleycat Acres, a now fiscally-sponsored, urban farming collective.
A few days after their first gathering, the Alleycats received an email from a landowner offering up an empty lot as a potential farm site. His only guidelines were to keep the one-fifth of an acre “clean, green and quiet.” The Alleycats immediately jumped on this opportunity. For the next few weeks, the team fully invested themselves in the project to obtain the resources they needed.
Concrete? Check. Compost? Check. Seeds? Check. With all systems go, the Alleycats hosted Seattle’s first urban crop mob on February 18, working alongside 35 energetic volunteers. That day, they measured, marked and constructed over a dozen raised beds, mixing in over 12 cubic yards of compost in the process. Thanks to generous material and tool donations, the cost to getting their first farm going was only $150.
Since this first groundbreaking, Alleycat Acres has harvested more than 250 pounds of food, and has delivered nearly 215 pounds of produce to the neighborhood food bank by bike. Over one hundred volunteers have joined the cause, and dozens of Seattle-area schools and organizations have created alliances with the collective to show their support.
More than 1,000 volunteer hours have gone into their projects, and many more are expected in the following months — a second farm site is now in the works and should be up-and-running by July 2010.
Almost overnight, the Alleycats went from strangers to family. Their organization went from unknown to widely-recognized in a matter of months. And the empty lots they’ve touched, transformed with hours of volunteer help, have gone from fallow to fruitful in merely a season. The instant success and support is beyond the collective’s wildest dreams. But urban farming, done on a community level, is truly what this city needs. And the people of Seattle recognize this.
Cities have lost their relationship with agriculture, but Alleycat Acres offers a way to rekindle that connection: a hands on approach to growing forth by working within communities to promote urban agriculture as an intimate means of reconnecting people, place and food.
To learn more about Alleycat Acres, the team behind it and how to grow a revolution in your city, check out their website.
Photos courtesy of Alleycat Acres.
