Grow Plan Working Group
The Grow Plan Working Group is developing a “staircase of growing success” to strengthen an equitable, diverse, and community-led food-growing ecosystem in Edmonton. The initiative responds to two central challenges: widespread food insecurity and the need for better access to culturally relevant foods.
The Grow Plan Is Ready. Now the Real Work Begins.
The Journey. Two years ago, this work started with a question, not an answer: What do we have to do to get the most people in Edmonton — especially the people the current system leaves out — to grow their own food in the best way possible?
The question mattered because food insecurity in Edmonton isn't an abstract statistic — it's a daily reality for a lot of households, especially those from the equity-deserving groups. And growing food isn't just a hobby or about calories. For many people, it's culture, dignity, healing, connection, and a form of control over what ends up on the table that a food hamper can't replace.
But growing food in YEG is genuinely hard. Land is all around us, but the system navigation and gaining proper access to it isn’t. Growing resources and knowledge don't always reach the people who most want it. And the people with the cultural knowledge and the drive to grow aren't always the same people who hold the land, the funding, or the institutional power to make growing possible at scale.
Most urban agriculture plans respond to that gap by writing policy — a document aimed at what a municipal government should do. That's important work, but on its own it has a weakness: government priorities shift, budgets tighten, and momentum built inside city hall can stall long before it reaches a backyard, a community garden, or a vacant lot. So the working group set the goal of designing a staircase of growing success to support an equitable and diverse food environment and ecosystem in YEG. We wanted something that wouldn't lose steam the moment the political wind changed. So instead of a policy plan, we set out to build a living, community-owned roadmap for growing food in Edmonton — made by and for the people who'd actually use it.
The Mobilization. Four rooms, four different questions through community engagement, and slowly, one shared picture: of where the real barriers sit, what capacity already exists but isn't connected to the people who need it, and what it would take to close that gap.
That picture became the Grow Plan — a Guide that lays out the roadmap, and a Menu of concrete, practical options that a person, a community group, or an organization can choose from based on what they can genuinely take on, not what a plan assumes they should. It isn't meant to be read once and set aside. It's meant to be picked up, again and again, by whoever's ready to act next.
In June 2026, the finished framework was shared with the wider community for the first time, at the food summit. It wasn't a one-way presentation. Growers, mutual aid groups, non-profits, and residents in the room left having named something concrete they were ready to take on — the first real test of whether a plan built this way could actually move people to act. It did. And we need more of it to come.
Who was involved? We extend our sincere appreciation to Working Group core partner organizations who helped shape this work:
We also want to thank the friends of Grow Plan, Young Agrarians Alberta, New Grocery Movement, and all the community members, growers, Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, Black Food Justice Leaders, Ethnocultural Community Leaders, organizations, educators, advocates, and residents who generously contribute and help us along the way.
The Vision & Call to Action. A roadmap only matters if people walk it. That was true on day one of this project, and it's even more true now that the project phase itself has come to an end.
The Grow Plan was never meant to depend on one working group, one grant cycle, or one government's priorities. It was built to belong to the community that shaped it — practical enough to act on right away, and open enough to keep growing as more people pick it up, and find their way to carry it forward.
Two years of conversations got us to a finished framework. What comes next is bigger than what came before: a much wider circle of Edmontonians stepping in to steward it, adapt it, and put pieces of the Menu into action in their own backyards, blocks, and organizations.
So consider this an open invitation. It’s a community challenge. If you've always wanted to grow food but didn't know where to start, or if you have been a gardener and are willing to share your knowledge, or if your organization has a garden plot, land, funding, or expertise to offer, there's a place for you in this next chapter. Explore the Grow Plan Guide, the Stepped Plan and Menu, find the piece that fits where you are, and help carry it forward.
