Sloan's Lake Citizen's Group

What is Denver Urban Gardens?

Denver Urban Gardens

Community.
It’s a word that says too much and not enough. Who can define it, really? It’s the sharing of interests, a listening ear, a sense of safety, a place of pride. You won’t find a definition explaining how community works or why, but in the coming together there is a comforting sense of hope. You know it when you see it because community brings dramatic change.

As a nonprofit organization, Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) operates and assists with the creation and management of over 70 metro-area community gardens and small parks.

Primarily serving low to moderate-income populations in urban neighborhoods, DUG provides opportunities for participants to supplement their diet with produce grown in nearby public gardens. Through the gardens, participants assume responsibility to improve their community, initiate a sense of pride in their surroundings, and improve their nutritional status through healthy, fresh food.

DUG was created in 1985 with a handful of volunteers who built three gardens in northwest Denver. In 1993, DUG took a more organized approach with the hiring of co-executive directors. Today, DUG’s 70 active sites stretch beyond Denver and into five surrounding cities.

DUG’s mission is to support transformation of vacant lots into vital community open spaces. The DUG gardens have become a community focus for producing food, fostering neighborhood activities and hosting education programs for over 25,000 individuals annually.

What does DUG do? Here’s a sampling:

• offers non-traditional training and education of gardeners, school groups and community-based programs for youth and adults,
  
• recruits and coordinates volunteer labor teams,
  
• provides free vegetable seeds and transplants to over 9,000 people each year,
  
• plans, designs, and constructs garden and farm sites and their on-going improvements,
  
• operates a working community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in Aurora,
  
• offers compost training through a partnership with Denver Recycles.

Community gardens are not just for growing vegetables. While tending a garden may be the initial goal, empowerment, self-sufficiency and pride in the neighborhood are the true, and valuable, ends.

For more information contact Beth Lokkesmoe, 303-292-9900.