How We Think About Community Engagement at Square Roots

At Square Roots, our mission is to responsibly bring our locally grown food to people in cities around the world, all year round. Part of that means ensuring a positive social and environmental impact—starting with the communities we farm in.  

We believe a farm should be part of its community. That’s why we hire locally and keep our supply chains short. Community isn’t an abstraction: it’s our colleagues, customers, neighbors, and friends. We seek to enrich the communities that we farm in, because they’re our communities, too. 

We approach community engagement in a few ways, with the knowledge that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, because every community has unique needs:

• Service: We get out into communities and share our people power.
• Hiring and recruitment pathways: We build relationships with local schools, non-profits, and community groups in order to hire local and create career opportunities in high-tech sustainable agriculture. ‍
• Product donations: We strive to ensure that the food we grow makes it onto someone’s plate.

Service 

Our campus’s doors are open to our community, so we can support, educate, and give back. We work with local organizations, and give our team members paid time off for volunteer work.

We’ve conducted farm tours and workshops with organizations like Harlem Grown to teach students about hydroponic farming. We’ve also been involved in ecosystem health initiatives—like cleaning up hundreds of pounds of trash from the banks of the Root River in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Hiring & Recruitment Pathways 

We love working with local high schools and after-school programs. We think high-tech farming is an exciting, rewarding career path—and we want to share these opportunities with high schoolers and young adults who are thinking about their next step. We also collaborate with higher educational institutions, such as Land Grant Universities and their Extension networks.

Donation

We generate less food waste than your typical farm, but we still sometimes have produce left over. It’s important to us that our delicious, nutritious greens make it onto someone’s plate. Each of our campuses has multiple donation partners, such as The Sharing Center in Kenosha, WI, which serves rural Kenosha County.

Our aim is to change the global food system, from the ground up. And an important part of that is to cultivate deep, responsible relationships in our communities. One harvest, and one farm at a time. 

If you work with youth aged 14-24, or with a community organization in Brooklyn, Grand Rapids, Kenosha, or Springfield, and want to connect with us, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.