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Community Gardens Program: Sleuthing with Citizen Scientists

08/07/2026 sam shepherd City Farm, Community Garden

A citizen scientist examines soil while their partner records their findings at a BioBlitz at City Farm, 2026

What lives in an urban garden? More than most people expect. Since 2025, SCLT has partnered with 15 Minute Field Trips and the Rhode Island Natural History Survey on a rolling BioBlitz series, spending mornings at SCLT gardens with community scientists documenting every plant, animal, and fungus they can find. The project is planned to run for ten years, visiting a different garden in the SCLT network each year to create a big picture view of what shares our natural spaces.

The first year brought the series to Peace & Plenty Community Garden on Peace Street in Providence, where five sessions across 2025 and 2026 turned up 405 distinct species across the garden’s 0.39 acres. Among the more striking finds: a species of bee, the Pugnacious Leafcutter Bee, previously unrecorded in Rhode Island. Two Robberfly species new to the site were discovered, along with two species of Woolcarder Bee and a rare sighting of the Golden Northern Bumblebee on blossoming sweet peas. The fifth and final Peace & Plenty session in June drew 26 participants, including gardeners, neighbors, and family members, who together logged 205 verified species in a single morning. A teenager who had never been to a BioBlitz before identified a beetle species that had not been recorded previously at the garden.

This season, the series has moved to City Farm, SCLT’s urban production and demonstration farm at 168 West Clifford Street in Providence. The first session in April turned up 223 living things across seven categories. The July session added roughly that many more. One final session remains: October 4, from 11am to 2pm, open to all ages and experience levels. Register at bit.ly/CFBioblitz.

The findings from every session are logged on iNaturalist and contribute to the Rhode Island Natural History Survey’s statewide biodiversity database, building a growing picture of what urban green spaces actually support. The answer, it turns out, is a lot.

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Workforce Development Program: Marking a Decade

08/07/2026 sam shepherd Somerset Hayward Farm, Youth Program

Youth Staff practice urban farm management at SCLT’s South Providence Youth Enterprise Farm

This summer, 19 young people are earning wages working at farms in Providence and Pawtucket/Central Falls, planting, harvesting, field-tripping, networking, and building professional experience that outgrows the season. The Youth Workforce Development program, now in its tenth year, has been a cornerstone of our work since long before it had a name.

The 2026 season is supported by the Governor’s Workforce Board, a partner that has helped sustain the program since its earliest formal years, and by Bloom Rhode Island, whose Violet Grant, the largest single gift in the funder’s history, subsidizes four Youth Staff positions at Galego Community Farm. There, participants are designing and installing native pollinator meadows and cut-flower gardens building portfolios in green industry careers. Additional support comes from several local foundations, financial institutions, and private donors whose aligned investment makes this work possible.

The program runs through mid-August, and numbers from 2025 show the impact is deep: 92% of Youth Staff rated their experience as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent,‘ and 60% are returned for this season.

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Farmer Services Program: Entering a New Chapter

08/07/2026 sam shepherd Farmland Access, Urban Edge Farm

Urban Edge Farm Food Hub takes shape among existing farm infrastructure

At Good Earth Farm in Cranston, the Garden Center & Farmers Co-Op is open, bursting with the colors and flavors of summer. Farmer-run and stocked with seasonal edible and ornamental annuals and perennials, the Co-Op is open Thursday through Sunday and welcomes anyone looking to grow. While you’re there, stop next door at Sanctuary Herbs for locally-crafted teas, tinctures, and culinary herbs.

Less than two miles up the road, a milestone years in the making is fast approaching. The Urban Edge Farm Food Hub, a post-harvest handling, storage, and distribution facility, is on track for full operation by the end of the year. Walk-in coolers, a commercial freezer, and space for future chopping, canning, and dehydrating equipment will fundamentally expand what farmers in SCLT’s network can do with the food they grow, providing the tools to store, process, and distribute harvests to more Rhode Islanders.

When the program started in 2016, we moved 3,500 pounds of fresh produce from local farmers to local eaters. In 2025, SCLT’s South Providence Healthy Food Hub saw the movement of 60,000 pounds of locally grown produce from farms to nutrition insecure neighbors. The Urban Edge Farm Food Hub will take this to a whole new scale.

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Healthy Food Access Program: Fighting Nutrition Insecurity

08/07/2026 sam shepherd Aggregation, Food Justice, healthy food access, Retail Partner

Produce distributed for free to seniors at an Elmwood community event, July 2026

One in three Rhode Island households does not have reliable access to enough food. When fresh, affordable produce is scarce, the consequences reach far beyond the dinner table. In Providence County, rates of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes each exceed the national average with direct ties to diet. Getting fresh food to the people who need it most is, at its core, a health intervention.

Since 2016, SCLT’s Healthy Food Access program has built one of the most direct responses to nutrition insecurity in the state, and it begins long before the harvest. SCLT staff and partners work with farmers across every stage of their operation, from land access and production planning to food safety training, business development, and market connections, so that when produce is ready, it moves quickly and predictably to the people who need it most. In 2025, that meant 60,000 pounds of locally grown food distributed across the state at no cost to recipients, through free farm stands and partnerships with community organizations, generating $350,000 in income for farmers who grew it.

Seasonal Food Access Associate Farah Figuereo

This season, Healthy Food Access Program Manager Kakeena Castro brought that work to a new venue, forging a partnership with Urban Greens Co-op Market, South Providence’s community-owned grocery at 93 Cranston Street, to bring network-grown produce to co-op shoppers from July through November, traveling less than 10 miles from field to shelf. Supporting the program through the season is Farah Figuereo, who joined the team in early July as SCLT’s Seasonal Food Access Associate.

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With Hope & Gratitude: Checking in with SCLT | August 2026

08/07/2026 sam shepherd Southside Community Land Trust

Dear Friends,

The growing season is well underway in Rhode Island and with it comes one of our favorite times of the year: farmers market season. At markets across the area, small-scale growers from SCLT’s network are bringing fresh, hyperlocal and seasonal produce directly to their neighbors week after week. This year, SCLT-network farmers and gardeners are selling at seven markets across Providence, Pawtucket, and Cranston, from the Hope Street Farmers Market, the largest in the state, to neighborhood spots like the Sankofa World Market, Broad Street, and the Central Falls Farmers Market. Stop by and meet the people who grew your food. Read more about the farmers selling at each of these seasonal markets here.

We’re also celebrating a recent legislative win that has been a long time coming: on June 19, Governor McKee signed the Small and Urban Farm Success Act into law. Modeled after the tax relief enjoyed by larger rural farms in the state for decades, this law extends property, income, and farm equipment exemptions to small and urban farms. For the farmers we work with, that means money that was going to taxes can now go back into the ground, into equipment, into seeds, into the work of growing more food for more people. SCLT played a central role in developing the bill’s language, and we are proud to have collaborated with powerhouse advocates to see it become law after years of persistence.

We are also more than halfway to our 2026 Annual Fund goal. As of this writing, supporters like you have raised $344,498 toward our $500,000 target. Those dollars fund the work we’re committed to: 19 youth staff hired this summer for paid workforce training, nearly 400 community gardeners tending plots across a network of 25 gardens and urban farms, 68 small-scale farmers supported at three peri-urban farm sites, and more than 26,000 nutrition-insecure Rhode Islanders reached with fresh food. We have a long second half ahead, and every gift moves us forward. You may contribute to these efforts with a gift to Southside. Please visit southsideclt.org/donate.

Thank you for reading, and for your continued support of this work.

With hope and gratitude,

Rochelle & Margaret

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Southside Community Land Trust
404 Broad Street
Providence, RI 02907
sclt@southsideclt.org
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©Southside Community Land Trust is a nonprofit organization in the State of Rhode Island.