We’ve worked with Chicago Youth Centers since 2017 leading garden programs at a number of their locations on the south and west sides of the city, including at CPS schools. During Margo’s certification course for Edible Gardening and Landscape Design, she designed a new garden space for CYC by repurposing a sand pit and guided the youth to bring it to life! During the pandemic, garden programming shifted online into “Gardening at Home” lessons, encouraging kids to garden with their families.

We started running garden programs at Belmont Village Senior Living in 2023; we currently lead the Garden Club with the Assisted Living residents, and the Memory Care garden program for residents living with dementia.

We started working with Carole Robertson Center in 2019 leading gardening workshops, and ran their Environmental Justice Changemakers program in partnership with After School Matters in the summer of 2020 (virtual programming).

We worked with ASM during 2018-2021 to run apprenticeship programs for teens: the Grant Park Urban Potager Farm Ambassadors apprenticeship, and the Environmental Justice Changemakers apprenticeship.

Margo led the “seed to table” preschool gardening program at Smart Love Preschool from 2015-2018. She loves teaching preschoolers about where their food comes from, and the joys of connecting with nature.

We worked with Urban Growers Collective during the summers of 2018 and 2019 to lead their Grant Park Urban Potager Farm advanced apprenticeship program in partnership with After School Matters. The teens learned how to give tours of this beautiful downtown farm to the public!

We led gardening programs and workshops with The Talking Farm at Edison Elementary and at YMCA Evanston, where we built raised bed gardens using their in-house wood workshop.

Sandbox Organics is a certified Organic farm selling a wide variety of high-quality, locally grown produce for the Chicagoland area through it’s CSA and the Logan Square Farmer’s Market. We collaborated with the farm owner, Yoram Shanan, to continually gain experience with organic production techniques that maximize yield and optimize small-scale farming and gardening practices.

 Aqualogue educates communities on their food systems through art, lectures, classes, and hands-on fun in their aquaponics learning center. Their educational program provides aquaponic system installations throughout Chicago that are compact, user-friendly and replicable. Learning about the closed-loop ecosystem in aquaponics promotes systems thinking, which can be translated into a variety of real-world applications and teaches students about food security, circular economy, water conservation and concepts within the natural sciences. Margo oversaw the development of their pilot educational program, which received full finding through their Kickstarter campaign.

The Urban Canopy supports Rainbow City Gardens with generous donations of compost, which is incredibly helpful for our programs so we can create lush, beautiful, healthy garden spaces.

Gethsemane Garden Center is a long time supporter of Rainbow City, offering donations of seeds and seedlings for our programs. In 2026, we are partnering with Gethsemane to offer a free educational workshop series!

In 2025, Rainbow City won a grant from Monarch Watch and received a flat of milkweed plugs, which we planted with the youth in our programs in order to encourage butterflies to visit our garden spaces.