The Community Agriculture Network is a collaboration of growing spaces—community gardens, church plots, urban farms, and orchards—each managed by trusted leaders in their respective communities. These sites are independently managed but supported by TNFP through shared tools, technical assistance, access to seed and compost, and a network of volunteers and educators.
Two volunteers from The Nashville Food Project received honors at the 2025 Mary Catherine Strobel Volunteer Awards. Marcie Smeck Bryant won the Social Justice Impact Award, and Cheri Ferrari was a top finalist for the Charles Strobel Legacy Award. Presented by Hands On Nashville/United Way, the awards are Middle Tennessee's largest annual celebration of volunteerism.
The Community Agriculture Network is a collaboration of growing spaces—community gardens, church plots, urban farms, and orchards—each managed by trusted leaders in their respective communities. These sites are independently managed but supported by TNFP through shared tools, technical assistance, access to seed and compost, and a network of volunteers and educators.
If we think only in terms of hunger, our response will be emergency food. This is important, but it’s reactive. If we frame the problem as food insecurity, we begin to think bigger. We move from charity to justice. In other words, you can end someone's hunger for a day. But ending food insecurity means making sure they don't face that hunger tomorrow, next week, or next year.
The Nashville Food Project has a new partnership with Brooklyn Heights Community Garden and Cosecha Community Development, thanks to a USDA Community Food Projects grant. The three organizations are working together to increase local access to fresh fruit and veggies. That includes some free produce boxes, new produce markets, and new gardening and wellness classes.
Have you ever imagined what it would be like to live in a version of Nashville where there was food growing everywhere? In every neighborhood, at city parks, churches and public offices, vacant lots, schools, your neighbor’s yard, and everywhere in between? As 2024 comes to a close and we look ahead to 2025, we’re excited to announce that we are embarking on a journey to transform our current network of three gardens and farms into a citywide hub-and-spoke model of community agriculture.
This Thanksgiving, Americans are projected to waste upwards of 316 million pounds of food. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If every household in America made small, intentional changes, we could make it a day of celebration for people and planet. Here are a few tips to reduce food waste that Chief Culinary Officer Bianca Morton has learned and adapted during her years at the Food Project.
Earlier this year, volunteer Jenn Crimm wrote, photographed, edited, and designed her own cookbook — a labor of love that aimed to preserve the meals that got her through a tough season. Food has always been central to Jenn’s life, from growing up in a close-knit Italian family to forging friendships around the table in Nashville. Her grandmother's cheesecake, a cherished but undocumented recipe, inspired her to create a cookbook to ensure her own recipes could be passed on to her loved ones.
There’s something to be said for things that grow steadily over time — like a well-tended garden. And just like the garden requires patience, care, and dedication to show up again and again, so do partnerships that create lasting change. For the last three years, Love, Tito’s, the philanthropic heart of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, has supported The Nashville Food Project as part of their Block to Block program.
We’re in the mood for some holiday cheer (and are always looking to get excited about the next big meal), so we asked some of our meals team about their favorite Thanksgiving dish. Hopefully, the answers get you excited about your own gathering — which we would love to be a part of in some small way!
In the midst of our annual Volunteer Celebration Lunch, an event to show gratitude to all of the many hands and hearts that help sustain our collective work toward community food security, Maggie Atchley reflects on her first couple of months working as the Volunteer Engagement Manager for The Nashville Food Project.
When Joe Hodgson decided it was time to retire, he knew he would have to find something to keep him busy. And it seemed like at every turn, an apple orchard would show up. He and his wife, Penny, interpreted it as a kind of sign — and with his background as a landscape architect, tending trees didn’t feel too unfamiliar. They bought several acres in McMinnville and got to planting.
Now in its fifteenth growing season, McGruder Community Garden is a space where people from all walks of life gather to find connection, learn from one another, and grow food for themselves and their communities. The garden includes several colorful raised garden beds, a pollinator garden full of fresh flowers, and a small orchard of fruit trees, and is lovingly tended by community members in partnership with The Nashville Food Project. Recently, a team helped us install 12 more raised beds, expanding our production capacity by 50 percent.
Simmer, our chef pop-up dinner series, is meant to bring people together over good food and good conversation. With the generous support of our community, on Friday night, local vegan chefs Ryan Toll, chef-owner of Season and formerly of the beloved vegetarian restaurant The Wild Cow, and Mariah Ragland, chef-owner of Radical Rabbit, did just that.
The Giving Grove, a Kansas City-based nonprofit serving communities experiencing a lack of access to fresh food, recently announced that it will expand to Nashville, TN, through a partnership with The Nashville Food Project. The Nashville Food Project will help community members plant new orchards and also inventory and support existing community orchard sites.
In part two of her blog series on public transit's impact on food availability, Director of Food Access Tera Ashley evaluates the affordability, variety, and quality of produce typically available in low-income, low-access areas. While many might draw conclusions that there is not demand for as much produce in these areas, anecdotal evidence indicates otherwise.
In the world of communications, knowing your organization inside out is crucial to telling its story. As a communications intern for The Nashville Food Project I have enjoyed telling our stories, but more importantly, I enjoyed having the privilege to learn by experiencing them myself. The Nashville Food Project’s mission is to bring people together to grow, cook, and share nourishing food, with goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city.
Earlier this month we hosted our 14th annual Nourish, presented by Kroger. We are humbled and so incredibly proud to announce that this was our most successful Nourish to date, raising over $260,000! However, beyond a fundraiser, this night is one we always look forward to as a special time to share connection over a beautiful meal with so many friends, volunteers, and supporters.
Our food access partner Water Walkers has a mission of tearing down the boundaries between urban youth and outdoor adventure — and in the summer, that mission takes them straight to the lake. But what’s a boat day without a picnic? Thanks to Sweet Peas Summer Eats for Kids, sponsored by Jackson National Life Insurance Company (Jackson®), Water Walkers can count on daily deliveries of made-from-scratch meals that keep these young bodies nourished and able to learn, grow and play while on the water.
