Seven sessions · One community
Grow Together Academy
Grow Something Together.
A seven-session hands-on Academy that helps your community plan, plant, care for, and sustain a growing space together.
What if your school, workplace, church, neighborhood, campus, or community organization didn't just start a garden—but learned how to grow and sustain one together?
Grow Together Academy helps existing communities turn available space, willing hands, and practical guidance into a growing space they can plan, plant, care for, harvest, and continue long after the Academy ends.
You bring the community. Grow Together Academy provides the learning journey, practical tools, and support to help you grow something together—and build the capacity to keep it growing.
Bring Grow Together Academy to your communityThe idea
More Than a Gardening Class
We don't create community so we can deliver a program. We equip communities that already gather to learn, practice, build, and grow together.
Across seven hands-on sessions, participants work together on a real growing space while developing practical skills and simple systems for caring for it.
Every session moves the community forward. Participants don't just talk about growing.
They walk the space, make decisions, prepare soil, plant, water, observe, maintain, harvest, plan, and lead. And with every session, the community takes a little more ownership.
Because the goal isn't simply to complete an Academy. The goal is to keep growing after the Academy ends.
The journey
Seven Sessions. One Community. Something Growing.
- 01
Session 1 — See the possibilities
Start With What You've Got
Walk your space, identify what you already have, and create a Community Farm Map + First-Grow Plan.
- 02
Session 2 — Build the foundation
Good Growing Starts Underground
Get your hands in the soil, explore what healthy growing conditions require, and prepare your community's growing space.
- 03
Session 3 — Plant with purpose
Plan It Before You Plant It
Choose appropriate seasonal crops, develop a simple crop plan, and get your community's plants in the ground.
- 04
Session 4 — Water wise
Every Drop Matters
Learn how to recognize when plants need water and establish a practical watering system your community can manage.
- 05
Session 5 — Keep it growing
Learn to Read the Garden
Observe plant health, practice basic maintenance and troubleshooting, and establish a simple rhythm for caring for the growing space together.
- 06
Session 6 — Harvest with purpose
Grow It for Somebody
Learn the basics of harvesting and handling what you've grown, then decide how your harvest can be eaten, shared, served, or used within your community.
- 07
Session 7 — Pass the keys
Keep It Growing Without Us
Bring everything together into your Community Farm Playbook, identify local leadership and responsibilities, and put your community's next growing action on the calendar.
What you build
Every Session Leaves Something Behind
Grow Together Academy isn't designed around seven disconnected lessons. Each gathering adds another piece to something your community can actually use:
- Community Farm Map
- Growing Plan
- Crop Plan
- Water Plan
- Care Plan
- Harvest Plan
- Community Farm Playbook
By the final session, your community doesn't just have plants growing. You have a practical roadmap for how to keep them growing together.
What makes it last
Skill + System + Rhythm
Sustainable community growing takes more than knowing how to put a plant in the ground. Grow Together Academy intentionally develops three things:
SKILL
We know how to do something we couldn't do before.
Participants practice real growing skills with their own hands.
SYSTEM
We have a practical way to keep doing it.
The community develops simple plans, responsibilities, tools, and processes for managing its growing space.
RHYTHM
We've decided when we're going to do it together again.
Before the Academy ends, the next workday, Farm Health Walk, planting, harvest, or community gathering goes on the calendar.
Skill + System + Rhythm = Sustainability
That's how a garden becomes something a community can carry.
You Don't Need to Be a Farmer
You don't need acres of land. You don't need expensive equipment. And the person helping lead Grow Together Academy doesn't need to be an agricultural expert.
The Academy is designed so that a teacher, volunteer, student leader, workplace wellness coordinator, nonprofit employee, ministry leader, neighborhood champion, or other trusted community member can help guide the hands-on experience.
Grow Together Academy can include practical resources such as:
- Step-by-step facilitator guides
- Short Quick-Start videos
- Participant field tools and workbook resources
- Materials and supply guidance
- Hands-on activities
- Virtual coaching
- Technical assistance from Flint River Fresh
You bring the people and the willingness to grow. We'll help equip you for the journey.
Who it's for
Built for Communities That Already Gather
Grow Together Academy can be adapted for:
K–12 Schools & Youth Organizations
Create a hands-on growing environment where young people can practice agriculture, teamwork, responsibility, food systems, and stewardship.
Colleges & Universities
Give student organizations, service initiatives, classes, and campus communities something meaningful to grow and manage together.
Workplaces & Corporations
Turn a growing space into an opportunity for employee wellness, team building, community engagement, and shared responsibility.
Faith Communities
Use available space to create opportunities for stewardship, fellowship, food sharing, service, and caring for neighbors.
Neighborhoods, Nonprofits & Community Organizations
Bring people together around a practical project that can produce food, skills, relationships, and community ownership.
Senior & Intergenerational Communities
Create spaces where growing knowledge, stories, responsibility, and practical skills can move between generations.
One Academy. Different communities.
The experience is adapted to the people, place, available space, and goals of each community.
Delivery
How Grow Together Academy Can Work
Communities have different levels of experience, staffing, and capacity. Grow Together Academy is designed to support more than one delivery approach.
FRF-Led
Flint River Fresh facilitates the hands-on journey alongside your community while helping identify and equip people who can continue the work.
Community-Led + FRF Supported
Someone within your community facilitates the local hands-on experience using Grow Together Academy resources, while Flint River Fresh provides virtual guidance, coaching, and technical assistance.
Train-the-Facilitator
A local community leader is equipped to facilitate most or all of the Academy using Grow Together resources and continued access to technical support when needed.
As your community develops confidence, our role can shift:
- Guide
- Coach
- Technical Assistance
- Connector
Because success isn't your community needing Flint River Fresh forever. Success is your community knowing what to do next.
Take-home
Your Community Farm Playbook
One of the most important things your community creates isn't planted in the ground. It's your Community Farm Playbook.
Throughout the Academy, participants capture the decisions, plans, responsibilities, and rhythms needed to manage the growing space.
The Playbook belongs to your community. So does what happens next.
By the end, your Playbook can help answer:
- 1What are we growing?
- 2Where are we growing it?
- 3How will we water and care for it?
- 4Who is responsible for what?
- 5What will happen to our harvest?
- 6What supplies do we need?
- 7Who helps lead?
- 8When are we gathering again?
Want to Celebrate What You've Grown?
Communities can add an optional Grow Together Celebration after completing the seven core sessions. Depending on the community and growing season, your celebration might become a:
- Community Harvest
- Garden Tour
- Tasting
- Community Meal
- Planting Day
- Youth Showcase
- Produce Giveaway
- Volunteer Activation
- Mini Market
- Neighborhood Gathering
Participants can share what they built, demonstrate what they learned, invite others into the growing space, and celebrate the people who made it happen.
It's not simply a graduation. It's an invitation for the next chapter to begin.
Part of the Fresh Start Smart Farm Lab
Grow Together Academy is the extended community learning journey of the Fresh Start Smart Farm Lab.
Along the way, participants may encounter ideas and tools connected to other Fresh Start Smart Labs—from seeds and water conservation to cooking, wellness, and markets—because growing food connects to much more than what happens in the dirt.
Communities can also discover Farm Lab ideas in action through the Farm Lab Shared Experience at the Flint River Fresh Backyard Garden Demonstration at the Sunbelt Ag Expo.
What Will Your Community Grow?
Maybe you have an empty raised bed. A patch of ground beside the church. A courtyard at school. A workplace wellness garden that needs new life. A few containers outside a community center.
Or simply a group of people saying:
“We'd like to grow something here. We just don't know where to start.”
That's enough to begin.
You don't have to build the biggest garden. You don't have to know everything. You just need a place to start, some people willing to participate, and a plan for taking the next step together.
- Bring your school.
- Bring your coworkers.
- Bring your congregation.
- Bring your neighbors.
- Bring your club.
- Bring your community.
Let's Grow Something Together.
Bring Grow Together Academy to your communityGrow Together Academy • Fresh Start Smart Farm Lab • Flint River Fresh