A Nonprofit Collective Housing Like-Missioned Initiatives for Land, Food, People, and Place

EAT LOCAL, BUY LOCAL, GROW LOCAL! by Christopher Silas Neal

“Solving the world’s energy and food problems would do a great deal to strengthen the global economy, prevent disease, and reverse the effects of climate change. The original Victory Garden program was designed to ease pressure on the public agricultural supply and support the war effort by encouraging families to grow their own food. I wanted to expand this idea to the broader concept of buying and eating local food.” {see more Christopher’s work at redsilas.com}

Memphis Tilth exists to cultivate collective action for health of land, food, people, and place. In concert with our board of directors and community partners, our staff will work toward an economically sustainable, socially equitable, and environmentally sound local food system.

Memphis Tilth will promote and cultivate a comprehensive approach toward regional, urban agriculture and local food value-chain development through seven distinct but overlapping programs:

1. Food and Faith Initiative - To promote health of land and community through congregational-supported agriculture (religious communities engaged directly in the production, procurement, aggregation, distribution, and preparation of locally grown and raised food). The food and faith initiative will facilitate clergy and congregational workshops to promote foodways for a thriving local economy and for increased access to healthy eating options for under-served communities.


2. Local Food Hub - a market-based solution to enhance local farmer livelihood and increase access to healthy eating options, procuring fresh fruit, vegetables, grains and humanely farmed proteins from gardens and farms within a 150-mile radius of Memphis - aggregating, storing, marketing and distributing locally grown and raised food.


3. Community Kitchen - a licensed and properly equipped community kitchen featuring programming for the promotion of culinary education, shared meal preparation, and value-added production.

4. Community Gardens - to recover blighted and ill-used urban lands for the creation of perennial and annual food gardens, to improve access to locally grown food in city neighborhoods, to empower city residents to transform empty, blighted property into thriving community gardens through training and resources that they need to successfully create and maintain sustainable urban gardens.


5. Farmers Market Incentive - in partnership with public and philanthropic efforts to to increase capacity by creating incentives for the consumption of healthy, locally grown fruits and vegetables at Memphis area farmers and mobile markets, in the form of matching dollars for subsidized local food purchases (e.g. SNAP EBT).


6. Food Policy Council - a diverse array of metropolitan Memphis constituents, who meet regularly to promote well-researched and evaluated policies and regulations designed to enhance local food economics, in partnership with farmer advisory boards comprised of urban, suburban and rural growers.


7. Urban Farms - to establish and sustain larger-scale production in urban core settings to increase access to healthy food and to build a stronger neighborhood level economy by creating synergistic components of local, natural food sourcing and accessible food distribution, 3-acres and larger; to provide an outlet for volunteer and student engagement to address the pressing need for increased food access, affordability, education, and distribution.

Contact Us

Please contact: [email protected]