🌱 Growing Together: Reflecting on 2025 and Planting New Seeds for the Year Ahead
SEED Chattanooga Year-End Blog
As 2025 comes to a close, we find ourselves reflecting with gratitude, pride, and excitement. What began as a small but determined idea, to equip Chattanooga residents with the tools, knowledge, and confidence to grow their own healthy food, has blossomed into a vibrant, community-rooted movement.
SEED Chattanooga was founded on a simple belief: everyone deserves access to fresh food, the skills to grow it, and a supportive community to grow with. This year, that vision took root in powerful ways.
🌿 What We Grew in 2025
Strengthened Partnerships & Renewed Community Garden
One of our greatest accomplishments this year has been deepening our partnerships with two incredible community hubs: The Jessie Igou Eastdale Community Center and Hardy Elementary School. Together, we restored and maintained twelve raised garden beds, six at each site, that served as living classrooms and neighborhood gathering spaces.
These gardens became more than plots of soil. They became places where:
Children their first seeds (see and lean the process)
Volunteers came from far and wide
Neighbors shared gardens that they will be able to harvest in the coming months.
Through hands-on gardening, participants explored soil health, plant life cycles, and environmental stewardship in ways that made learning tangible, joyful, and empowering.
Building Community Ownership
Perhaps our proudest achievement is how community members have embraced these garden spaces as their own. Volunteers, parents, and neighbors consistently showed up offering their time, their cultural food traditions, and their lived experience to help the gardens thrive.
At SEED Chattanooga, community members are not participants; they are co-creators. That model of shared ownership is the reason these projects continue to flourish long after the first planting day.
🌱 Looking Forward: Planting Seeds for the New Year
As we step into 2026 (or the beginning of a new season), we are energized by all that lies ahead.
In the coming year, SEED Chattanooga will:
Expand our educational programs, making them more accessible to youth and families across the city
Grow our network of community partners, identifying new neighborhoods ready to transform underused outdoor spaces into thriving gardens
Develop a robust garden-based curriculum that makes environmental education engaging for all ages
Increase food access by producing more fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables
Create more opportunities for leadership and volunteerism, ensuring gardens remain community-owned and community-led
Our foundation is strong, and our purpose is clear: to plant seeds of health, empowerment, and resilience throughout Chattanooga.
