How Change Happens

There is a moment that happens in our programs, over and over. A child tastes a green they foraged themselves and realizes food has a source. A parent learns the name of a plant from their eight-year-old. A neighbor discovers ripe berries on a city fence they have walked past hundreds of times and stops, surprised by the world's generosity.

In that moment, something shifts — the living world stops being background and becomes relationship. Brooklyn Rewilders exists to create that shift.

From separation to belonging, from scarcity to abundance, from passing by to experiencing fully.

In school gardens and on city streets, everything we do is designed to bring people close enough to the living world that they feel it, value it, and find their place in it. We believe that feeling changes everything — how we see our neighborhoods, how we raise our children, how we move through the world we share with every other living thing.

This is how everything changes — one block, one fence, one child at a time.

Your support is what makes these moments possible.

What Your Support makes possible:

Our School Programs

“She is the happiest after leaving Brooklyn Rewilders compared to any other day at pick up. Being out in the fresh air, making food, and touching the garden seem to really agree with her and recenters her somehow."

— Parent, PS282

Children in our afterschool and in-school programs spend their time outside, getting close to the living world in ways that stay with them. Over the course of a year they:

• Plant native asters, goldenrods, and milkweed and watch the bees and butterflies arrive

• Learn to tell female and male plants apart, and why it matters to the whole ecosystem

• Study bumblebee queens preparing for winter and sketch what they observe in field journals

• Forage wild greens and pound them into pesto with a mortar and pestle

• Make herb butters, wild teas, and fermented pickles — learning the food cycle from garden to table

• Observe the insects, birds, and fungi that share their schoolyard and trace the relationships between them

• Track seasonal change in the same garden across fall, winter, and spring

• Make art and paper from natural and foraged materials with visiting artists and makers

• Bring all of it home — teaching their families the names of things, changing how a whole household sees the street they live on

Brooklyn Rewilders "teaches how we are all connected, and even more, how we are all connected to the living world. Our child taught us about female and male plants — we couldn't believe it. Collecting and paying attention, the focus on details that we all overlook. It is quite profound actually."‍ ‍

— Parent, United Arts & Letters 305

Fences of Abundance

“Fences of Abundance exemplifies abundance thinking. Instead of lamenting a scarcity of foraging opportunities, you noticed that fences are abundant and enhanced that pattern, to benefit everyone. Truly creating a gift economy — I'm so grateful for what you are creating. I feel better just thinking about berry picking in Brooklyn!"

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, scientist and bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Along city streets and fence lines, native berry hedges are going in — raspberry canes, blueberry bushes, serviceberries and other fruiting native plants that feed both people and wildlife. Each site is stewarded by the community that lives near it, freely tended and freely open to anyone who passes.

Your support plants the hedges, trains the stewards, and grows the network — in Brooklyn and through a freely shared protocol that any community anywhere can use to start their own.