The Green Lots Project

Green Lots Project is a community organization dedicated to growing food, stewarding the land, and empowering communities.  We emphasize food autonomy, Indigenous Knowledge, and reclamation of our Indigenous heritage.  

The Green Lots Project

medicinal teas and tinctures, seeds, education, garden design

What We Do

The Green Lots Project allows us to steward the land and all our relations collectively. Learning from the land, our gardens, we develop relationships with our plant relatives, eachother and ourselves. We get great food and medicine as we decolonize our minds bodies and spirits.

Through the Seed Keepers Collective and Smith Scholars, we deepen our knowledge and teach what we know to others.

These programs offer teens and young adults opportunities to explore the land and creatively interact with all our relations.

Pancho M – Co-Founder

Seed Keepers Collective

The Seed Keepers Collective is an effort by The Green Lots Project dedicated to building a group of Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous seedkeepers and land stewards.

We focus our efforts on learning seed saving, plant propagation, food preservation, garden design, native plants and their uses, and Indigenous Knowledge/African Heritage Knowledge.  In weekly classes instructors will provide interns with tools to further develop the project. We aspire to teach what we learn to other community members in gardens and community spaces throughout Chicago. Through art, design, seed saving, teaching and other ventures, the collective will become self-sufficient.

While helping to care for Sacred Greens Community Garden we will focus on saving seeds, propagating plants and saving roots, and creating a decentralized seed library of high-quality seed. The decentralized seed library will include the SKC as well as GLP members, other workshop students and members of the broader urban ag and food autonomy movement in Chicago. This will be our contribution to the In Lak’ Ech CommUnity Wealth Project.

The Smiths Scholars

This project developed as a memorial project for Jacqueline Abena Smith, an important member of the Chicago Black, Indigenous and Latinx food autonomy community who died unexpectedly in March 2021. 

She served as garden coordinator for GLP for six years and taught numerous courses and workshops with us.  In her honor we designed a program to bring the community of Black and Indigenous growers closer together.

The program has four pillars: 1) teaching seed saving and plant propagation techniques as widely as possible, 2) community seed exchanges, 3) mutual aid, and 4) collective meal of all participants.

2023 allowed us to include 6 youth, ages 14-17 to join us at the garden in exchange for a stipend. This created a sense of community and allowed for intergenerational conversation to inspire us all.