Seeding Food Sovereignty Through Garden Education
Rainbow City Gardens brings hands-on garden programs and workshops to communities across Chicago — empowering people of all ages to grow their own food and connect with the natural world.
From school gardens and youth programs to community workshops and programming for seniors, we meet people where they are and build the skills, knowledge, and confidence to grow.
We believe urban spaces can be places of abundance. Our mission is to build food sovereignty and community resilience through garden education, so that neighborhoods have the knowledge and agency to shape their own sustainable food systems.
We lead educational gardening programs and workshops across the Chicago area. We also offer online gardening classes, consultations and coaching.
Sign up to volunteer! Youth and school gardens need community support.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter with program updates, seasonal garden tips, and resources.
Upcoming Volunteer Opportunities
Gardening Workshops
Rainbow City Gardens (RCG) offers a variety of workshops which can be tailored according to your needs and goals. Workshops include but are not limited to:
Year-Round Programs
Rainbow City Gardens offers ongoing educational programs that guide participants through the process of gardening– from seed to table, and cooking to composting. We encourage participation in the entire process of organic gardening– soil prep, planting, maintenence, harvest, seed saving, and much more! Our goal is to show people of all ages that growing your own food can be easy and fun. Also, there are always garden-based activities that can be done indoors during the winter or inclement weather.
Support Garden Education
Rainbow City Gardens can now accept tax deductible donations that will go towards garden education materials and general operating funds.
RCG is fiscally sponsored by Liberation Education Collective, a nonprofit 501C3 organization that offers virtual extracurricular courses on progressive topics to Chicago youth.
Mission & Vision
We at Rainbow City Gardens are fully committed to promoting diversity, human rights and the rights of nature. We are anti-racist and anti-colonialist. By working in underrepresented and underresourced communities, our work supports increased equity and racial, social, and environmental justice. We uphold BIPOC and LGBTQ+ rights.
Chicago sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations. We will only be able to make progress towards repairing our land and communities when we as a society truly recognize the original stewards of the land who were displaced by colonization. Indigenous populations obtain a wealth of knowledge on traditional regenerative growing practices and environmental techniques that have the potential to mitigate and address the impending threat of climate change.
Rainbow City is a vision of the future. It represents a global community, where people of different backgrounds live in harmony and show respect to one another. Rainbow City is of course full of beautiful, colorful gardens that brighten up the urban landscape. This futuristic, green metropolis is so full of life and native gardens that the entire city becomes a wildlife corridor. Since many of its inhabitants grow their own food organically and regeneratively, the city is brimming with abundance and is a place where many people share, trade, and sell produce and value added products; as such, Rainbow City is more than food secure– it is a food sovereign zone that is in control of its food system.
We appreciate your support!
Rainbow City Gardens 