UN ambassador visits Chicago to address food insecurity
UN ambassador visits Chicago to address food insecurity
The Urban Growers Collective, an urban garden located in Grant Park, showed off their bounty to Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who is in town speaking to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
CHICAGO - One Chicago organization is boosting efforts to provide the city’s most vulnerable citizens with healthy and nutritious food.
An urban garden located in Grant Park has been the center of a discussion about global food insecurity.
The Urban Growers Collective showed off their bounty to the U.S. representative to the United Nations, who is in town speaking to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
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Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield toured the Grant Park Art on the Farm, where vegetables, herbs and edible flowers are flourishing.
The Urban Growers Collective operates eight farms in the city, to provide food and teach Chicagoans about growing their own food. Co-founder and CEO Erika Allen said the ambassador's visit was an opportunity to show how foods of the world belong in the city center.
Erika Allen, co-founder and CEO of Urban Growers Collective.
"We really wanted to show her how since 2005, we have been farming in this space as a kind of a policy setting, workforce, youth-involved space to really show that food does belong in our urban, peri-urban and rural landscapes that we can eat. And that the cultures of the world can be represented in the food that we're growing," Allen said.
Thomas-Greenfield spent years helping people on the continent of Africa battle food insecurity, a problem experienced in all countries. She said she believes the continent can become the breadbasket to the world.
It's estimated that food insecurity has increased 10 times due to the Covid-19 pandemic and other world issues. Allen said it's highlighted the importance of people being able to grow their own food.
"What we're doing here isn't going to solve global hunger, but what it does is amplifies the importance of everybody being able to grow their own food, thinking about food and where it comes from," Allen said. "We experienced during the pandemic lots of supply chain breakdowns. One of the ways that we've always advocated in the kind of urban-agg movement, community food system movement in the country and globally, is really about folks having agency, permanent access to land."
Allen said Chicago’s gardens help meet the immediate needs at home.