The mission of Karma Community Garden is to provide an outdoor classroom where STEAM education is the focus, providing various career paths and resources in an outside environment. We want to enthrall the community by physically interacting with the dirt and learning soil and food science, activating outdoor learning. However, the primary mission of Karma Community Garden is to gather and organize the community while providing a space to demonstrate advanced vertical farming practices.

On North Hackett Avenue, between Belleview and Park Place sits St. Mark's Episcopal Church. In the back corner, past the parking lot, sits a small but lush garden space. Gardeners, Meg Edwards, Jane Shero, and Deacon Michelle Mooney are giving a tour of the space. “The space is about 20 years old. We took the turf out, brought sand in – it’s very clay-y here. Every year we would lay down mulch and compost, and now it grows a little bit of everything.”

In the Harambee neighborhood on Buffum Street, right between Meinecke and North Avenue, lives Hilltop Community Farm & Garden. The first thing you notice when you visit the space are the garden beds. There are fifty of them in total, each is 4’x 8’, laid out in long lines with skinny pathways in between each strip. Many perennial herbs are in full bloom at this point in the growing season. Massive stalks covered in flowers dominate the view. As you walk down the rows, you’ll see the picnic table and chairs under the tree, inviting you to take a rest and enjoy the view. The garden is a hodgepodge of scrapped and recycled materials that have been arranged to create a vibrant green pocket in Harambee where gardeners use all types of growing techniques to raise a diverse variety of fresh food.

In 2021, Solomon Community Temple United Methodist Church joined Groundwork’s Milwaukee Grows Garden Network. Located on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Solomon Community Temple is a valuable community resource in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood.