2023 Impact Report

As with every year at DUG, 2023 was full of adventure. And breakthroughs.

Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) continues to be a gem of metro Denver. Something for Colorado to be immensely proud of. As one of the largest independent community garden organizations in the country, a DUG site can be found in nearly every neighborhood across seven counties. 

Our 200 gardens continued to thrive with the baseline infrastructure initiative and a doubling down on support of our tremendous Garden Leaders. Not to mention our community of over 17,000 gardeners going strong while growing food and building community. 

The Etkin Family Food Forest Initiative reached its 20 site goal and started to refine its process including community input meetings, new site recruitment and Tree Keeper training and support. With trees in the mix, DUG’s impact grows exponentially. In 5-10 years we’ll be producing thousands of pounds of fresh organic produce freely available to the community. These legacy installations will be in places for decades profiling food while contributing to the Denver’s tree canopy. We couldn’t be happier about the success of this new program. 

DUG’s Food Access programming added a Culturally Inclusive Seed library to meet the needs of our diverse community as they seek to grow foods from their heritage.  

And our Education and Engagement wrapped up our ECE teacher cohort in additional to delivering our Urban Roots Workshops for all.

Our team grew to 22 as we expanded to better and more completely serve our community and our Advisory Council found its footing as trusted, nationally recognized advisors on issues critical to DUG’s current activities and strategic evolution. 

I had the good fortune to end the year with a trip to Australia where I keynoted their Urban Agriculture Forum. It was an experience of a lifetime. Lots of learnings and even more shared experiences. Read about my adventure here. 

Thank you for your interest and support of Denver Urban Gardens. We couldn’t do any of it without you – our community.

With Gratitude,
Linda Appel Lipsius
Executive Director

Launched the Urban Garden Project to unite, uplift, and activate the community garden movement across the US and the world.

Goals of the Urban Garden Project:

1. Establish community gardens and food forests as “must haves” instead of “nice to haves” in the eyes of city planners.
2. Unite, strengthen, and activate the national and global gardening community in thought partnership and advocacy.
3. Secure long-term funding and provide additional resources (back office support, group insurance, etc) to bolster the operational strength of new and existing organizations so they can focus on growing food and strengthening communities.

Keynoted the Australia Urban Agriculture Forum November 2024

Adult and Youth Education

• 734 workshop and class attendees 
• ⅓ of attendee fees were covered through our pay-what-you-can model
• Taught in 12 Early Childhood Education (ECE) classrooms 
• Partnerships with Slow Food Denver and We Don’t Waste for our new Seed to Plate to Regenerate program

Community Composter Training Program

• Hosted 44 free compost workshops and public compost classes
• Attended by over 500 community members in addition to 300 DUG gardeners all across the Front Range

Grow a Garden 

• 71% of recipient households have a combined income of less than $50,000
• 12,152 community members served 
• Distributed 1,901 kits including 9,554 seed packets and 17,109 plants that will produce 78,402.25 projected pounds of food

Culturally Inclusive Seeds

• 44 varieties provided
• 490 specialty seeds distributed to DUG gardeners

Community Seed Distribution 

• 27,000+ seed packets distributed, equivalent to 300+ pounds of seeds and 10,000,000 individual seeds 

• Expansion of our Baseline Infrastructure Initiative (BII) program
• Supporting community gardens and food forest creation in the West Area with support from our $500,000 EPA grant
• Launching the Food Forestry Training Program
• Additional workshops, including hiring community members to teach specialized classes and series on organic gardening, herbalism, and more