The mission of the U.S. Botanic Garden and the American Public Gardens Association, through the Urban Agriculture Resilience Program, is to support public gardens and their partners in fostering collaborative urban agriculture, community gardening, and food-growing programs. This initiative aims at promoting public garden involvement in projects that combine food growing and education while also addressing the food security challenges facing communities.
The Urban Agriculture Resilience Program was established in 2020 with a focus on enhancing the resilience of urban agriculture and community gardening efforts across the United States. With financial awards to 73 urban agriculture projects thus far, the program emphasizes the importance of public gardens in collaborations that focus on food growing and education to tackle food security issues. The program's broad goals include encouraging urban agriculture collaborations between public gardens and partner organizations, incorporating educational programming in urban food growing, engaging the public in these initiatives, addressing food security challenges particularly those exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing equitable access and benefit sharing in communities, and building capacity in urban agriculture within the public gardens community and beyond.