Americana Foundation

This grant will enable FLOW to develop a communications and outreach plan that will engage young people in understanding the threats and taking meaningful action to protect the Great Lakes. 

With this grant, the I-Collective will address issues relating to food sovereignty within the Indigenous community in Detroit by increasing access to culturally relevant foods, creating educational materials, and introducing programming geared towards cultivated relationships between the land and one another. 

This grant will support Feed Flint, a program that provides locally grown, chemical-free, fresh produce to residents living in and around Flint while providing our youth and residents jobs, workforce development, and volunteer opportunities. Feed Flint delivers takeout meals, produce boxes with recipes, and home deliveries as part of our work to guide and support families in moving towards sustainable abundance. We do this through the South Flint Soup Kitchen, Market Stands, the Asbury Cafe, and our Mobile Food Trailer.

This grant will support the development, creation, and presentation of a new dramatic program to activate the Detroit Central Farmers Market, which is being reconstructed and installed at The Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. The market will serve as a learning laboratory to share important stories of historical innovations in agriculture and connect them to issues surrounding foodways, sustainability and the environment.

This grant will enable Edible Flint to expand educational programming at the Edible Flint Educational Farm, which models urban farming techniques to inspire and support healthy food production, and will support Edible Flint's Garden Starters program, which supplies and supports residential gardeners in Flint and Genesee County.

This grant will help fund a program that processes high-quality surplus food from local growers, food manufacturing byproducts, overripe produce, and commercially-sized foods to create healthy, culturally appropriate meals for food insecure Detroit families.

This grant will enable HUDA to rejuvenate an urban garden created by volunteers at HUDA, a free clinic in north Detroit, to connect patients of the clinic with fresh food and other strategies for healthy eating and wellness.

This grant will support the production of a PBS documentary film that will draw viewers into the worlds of farmland preservationists, stream ecologists, and fisheries and wildlife biologists working together to restore water quality, revive aquatic habitats, and return traditional hunting and fishing resources to the Indigenous people and all regional residents during a time of dramatic climate change.  The film will focus on the activities of the Tribal Stream and Michigan Fruit Belt Collaborative, a group led by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians that is re-opening streams and wildlife corridors and improving agricultural practices in a region decimated by deforestation and private land development.

With this grant, Old Sturbridge Village will develop a unique, experiential learning opportunity in a yearlong study of historic agriculture for middle school students at a school that targets “hard to reach/hard to teach students.”

This grant will enable the grantee to develop interpretative programming at the Delano Homestead to honor the legacy of Native American and Black farmers that used sustainable farming methods to maintain steady harvests and soil fertility across generations.

With this grant, the Superior Watershed Partnership (SWP) and the Great Lakes Conservation Corps (GLCC), in collaboration with community partners including Partridge Creek Farms (PCF) and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC), will establish a network of native plant gardens. Plants and seeds produced from project efforts will be utilized for prioritized restoration projects and/or saved to sustain the project for years to come.

WDET will use this grant to produce 10 stories focused on grassroots organizations engaged in regenerative and sustainable practices in the Detroit region. The focus will be diverse voices that represent the wide variety of experiences and modalities that Metro Detroiters are utilizing to repair and reconnect with our land and each other.

This Grant will support a program operated by Our Kitchen Table ("A Sense of Place) that seeks to improve the availability of local food among residents in a low-income neighborhood in Grand Rapids through community gardening, nutrition education, and other services.  This grant will support the program and enable OKT to broaden its reach to include members of the Latin, Native American, returning citizen, and differently abled populations.

With this Grant, FLOW will convene a workgroup of nationally recognized experts, key stakeholders, and decision-makers to develop a common understanding of Michigan's groundwater problems and reach consensus on measures to strengthen groundwater protection and address contamination and depletion.

This Grant will support the Greening of Detroit's Detroit Conservation Corps program, which provides Detroiters with apprentice-based landscape, agriculture and urban forestry training.  The grant will support the use of Lafayette Greens urban garden as an outdoor classroom and teaching site, and to support two new part-time Garden Assistant job opportunities at Lafayette Greens for DCC graduates.

This Grant will enable Growing Hope to scale up its teen programming, which provides Ypsilanti teens with meaningful employment that builds their identity, leadership skills, and confidence and educates them to become leaders within the local food system.  Growing Hope will use its urban farm to host a paid teen program that prepares youth for jobs and careers in sustainable agriculture while creating the next generation of leaders who can advocate for and create a better food system.

This Grant will support the Alliance's efforts to develop technical and legal information to contest the construction of a marina development that threatens the resources at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River.

This Grant will help North Oakland Headwaters Land Conservancy purchase two wetland parcels in the Shiawassee River headwaters that is one of the last two habitat locations of the globally-endangered Powesheik Skipperling Butterfly and establish a stewardship fund for its protection.

With support from the Americana Foundation, KGD, in collaboration with Detroit Black Community, Food Security Network (DBCFSN), Oakland Avenue Urban Farm (OAUF), and numerous other partners, will leverage more than $55,000 to establish the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund and to provide technical support and resources to increase Black land ownership in Detroit's urban agriculture community.

This grant will assist CARES of Farmington Hills to open Michigan’s first SNAP/Bridge Store within an existing Free Food Pantry. The Pantry and Store will help reduce the financial stress of families that depend on SNAP benefits, including families that are new to SNAP due to COVID-19.

Soil2Service will use this grant to purchase the equipment needed to create high-quality videos to used to provide education and training to support the growth of small farmers and food producers and to assist individuals in making healthy and local food choices.

This grant will enable Eastern Market to improve the safety of food distribution channels in Detroit and SE Michigan; work with Michigan Farmers to increase resiliency and self-sustainability by preserving increased amounts of food for the winter of 2021; and build capacity to distribute emergency food supplies over the next 18 months.  The ultimate purpose is to assist the region to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and be prepared for a possible second wave.

This grant will enable MIFFS to connect at-risk, beginning, and underserved farmers with resources they need to respond to restrictions and recommendations caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  MIFFS will serve as a central clearinghouse for COVID-19 resources, host virtual trainings for farmers on COVID-19 requirements, connect farmers to meal service providers who are reaching vulnerable populations, and ensure that resources and training are available to Spanish-speaking farmers.

In this project, Asbury will recruit and train members of the local community in Flint, MI to become ambassadors that equip friends, family members, and neighbors with information about the access to locally-grown produce.  The objective of the program will be to increase the number of residents that choose fresh produce over more convenient food items.

Forgotten Harvest will use this grant to recruit, manage, and equip a volunteer workforce at the Forgotten Harvest Farm.  This workforce will plant and harvest approximately 880,000 pounds of produce to relieve hunger in metro Detroit, at a time when the emergency food network has become even more important due to COVID-19.