Growing sustainable communities since 2001
Our Mission
Our mission is to cultivate food justice in Greater Portland by providing education, resources, and opportunities to grow and share culturally familiar food.
Founded in 2001, Cultivating Community’s place-based programs prioritize people most likely to experience hunger and be excluded from access to fresh food and land – including children, immigrants, people of color, older adults, and those with limited resources.
We Value Justice.
Current systems benefit the privileged while oppressing others. We work to address inequities in food systems by fostering a community where everyone has opportunities to access land, markets, and fresh, culturally familiar food.
We Value Community.
Collaboration is vital to our work. We show up for our partners and participants. We strive to make our programs accessible and welcoming. We build community-based food solutions that are immediately impactful, honor diverse cultural traditions, and contribute to lasting change.
We Value Equity.
Our communities are stronger and more resilient when everyone has the resources and the nourishment they need. We leverage our organizational power to meet varied needs and dismantle systems that cause hunger and exploit people and nature.
We Value Digging In.
Addressing the root causes of injustice and inequity requires self-awareness, humility, difficult conversations, hard work, and compassion for ourselves and others. We face these challenges head-on, embrace creative solutions, and hold ourselves accountable to keep digging deeper.
We Value Learning.
We all have a lot to learn and a lot to share – we cultivate opportunities for individuals and communities to discover and share their wisdom. We support self-reflection, listening, and growing from our missteps. We value the curiosity that is sparked by connecting with nature and new experiences.
We Value Land Sovereignty.
Land ensures self-determination for people to grow their own food, connect with the earth, and share cultural traditions. We focus on reliable access to land, especially for those who have been historicall and are currently dispossessed of land, prioritizing Indigenous people, Black People, and people of color.
History
2001
Cultivating Community was founded by Craig Lapine to increase access to local foods and hands-on learning in public schools and community spaces. We have been a dedicated partner at Portland Public Schools since.
2002
We launched a food justice-based youth program, now known as our Youth Leadership Intensive Program. Today, we provide paid internships for 50 youth annually in the Cumberland County area, prioritizing teens with limited resources who don’t speak English as a first language.
2004
Cultivating Community built the Boyd St. Urban Farm in the East Bayside neighborhood, which has become the heart of many of our programs and includes a vibrant community garden, an urban orchard with over 30 varieties of fruit, and a shared open-harvest garden that anyone can harvest from.
2009
We adopted the New American Sustainable Agriculture Program (NASAP) from Coastal Enterprises, Inc. Participants from immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking backgrounds accessed land, skills, and resources to farm in Maine, while growing culturally familiar crops.
2010
We launched a network of multilingual farm stands that are accessible to all regardless of income, which highlight hard-to-find crops that are sought after by Maine’s immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking communities.
2011
Cultivating Community facilitated universal acceptance of SNAP/EBT/WIC benefits through a token system at Portland’s farmers’ market, increasing the accessibility of locally grown produce.
2013
We began our partnership with the City of Portland to expand access to agriculture in urban spaces. Since, we’ve expanded growing spaces in the City’s garden program, nearly doubling the number of plots by 2017. Now, nearly 500 families grow together on public land.
2015
We collaborated with St. Mary’s Nutrition Center to launch the Good Food Bus, a mobile food market selling fresh fruits and vegetables directly to individuals’ homes across three counties in Maine.
2018
Cultivating Community partnered with Falmouth Land Trust to restore Hurricane Valley Farm and support local food production. This 62-acre farm provides land access and increases food security for 50 New American families.
2020
In partnership with other local nonprofit organizations, we delivered fresh, culturally familiar produce to Portland neighborhoods in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
2021
Cultivating Community joined Good Shepherd Food Bank’s Mainers Feeding Mainers network to expand access to culturally familiar foods in pantries in Cumberland and Androscoggin counties.
2023
After a few years of interim leadership, Cultivating Community hired Executive Director Silvan Shawe to lead the next chapter.
Header and background photo by Greta Rybus
