Project Overview
Walnut Way Conservation Corp. is a 501c3 nonprofit located in Milwaukee’s Lindsay Heights neighborhood — a vibrant, African-American community nestled on the city’s near-Northside.
The Lindsay Heights community has a rich history and a bright future — and our mission is to sustain this economically diverse and abundant community through civic engagement, environmental stewardship, and creating venues for prosperity. We’ve implemented numerous economic development, environmental, and redevelopment projects in service of that mission — one being our robust urban agriculture program.
Our Urban Agricultural Program
Walnut Way’s urban agriculture program is rooted — pun intended! — in innovation. Our residents have transformed vacant lots into production gardens and orchards. We utilize a hoop house, rainwater storage, composting, solar power, and bee apiaries. Demonstrating the ability to grow healthy food is essential to our community’s health and wellness goals, and maintaining a clean and beautiful agricultural campus is essential to environmental stewardship.
Food grown on campus is shared with neighbors and sold at local markets, restaurants, and grocery stores. They’re also transformed into products by our Growing Youth Leadership interns. The campus is a rich environment for learning and sharing with neighbors, employees, and visitors from all over the world.
Our urban agriculture program is outgrowing our current facility and infrastructure — which is a great problem to have! We’re incredibly proud of the program we’ve built — and we need your help to continue to grow. That’s where the Walnut Workshed Project comes in.
How You Can Help: The Walnut Workshed Project
Our goal is to build an innovative facility — what we’re calling the Walnut Workshed — that will support our current farming capacity and allow us to expand our impact in the future. With the help of our friends and partners at Outpost Natural Foods, we’ll repurpose a used shipping container into a refrigeration and food processing facility in tandem with a two-car garage.
The Workshed will help further the mission of our community in several key ways:
- Less food waste due to refrigeration abilities
- Accessibility and protection for tools, and additional storage
- A space for our Growing Youth Leadership interns to gather, have workshops, and work in an enclosed space during rainstorms and inclement weather
- Increased capacity to provide fresh, chemical-free produce to the community
Any donation towards our $30K goal will grow our vision of an environmentally just community. The Workshed Project offers us a chance to be deliberate and connect all the dots of our work — health and wellness, economic prosperity, and environmental stewardship. We’d love to have you along for the journey!
More About Walnut Way
We were founded over 20 years ago by Lindsay Heights residents — and from the very start, two key elements have guided our work: the importance of place, and that the way we work together matters. With our residents, young people, business owners, nonprofits, and a wide range of stakeholders, we carved out a vision of what our community could be, and we’ve been working toward and refining that plan ever since through a community-wide Quality of Life plan.
Since our purposeful beginnings, we’ve restored dilapidated homes to quality housing, built a vibrant community resource center, transformed vacant lots into gardens and orchards, strengthened neighborhood safety, developed the Innovation and Wellness Commons for economic development, built pathways to meaningful employment through our Blue Skies Landscaping Program, created innovative wellness programs for men and women, and engaged residents of all ages in neighborhood revitalization activities. Head here to learn more about us: https://www.walnutway.org/about/
Our Team
Marissa Cudworth: Environmental Stewardship Public Ally, Project Planning & Development
Jeremy Davis: Environmental Specialist, Oversight of Project Planning & Construction
Amber Ascher: Environmental Stewardship Operations Coordinator
Amanda Maqueia: Communications Specialist Volunteer
Kurt Baehmann: Partner & Sustainability Manager, Outpost Natural Foods Co-op
