Who We Are
Atplanta offers sliding-scale, comprehensive gardening services while inspiring appreciation for locally-grown food.
Our mission is to make the process of growing food accessible to everyone - regardless of income or skill level. We install and maintain productive organic gardens and share knowledge, resources, and skills along the way, enabling people to continue without us!
We offer an alternative to global food production systems, which have done significant harm to both people and the planet. While not a substitute for grocery stores, our gardens empower individuals to reconnect with food as a meaningful process rather than a product.
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Gabe
Co-founder and real-life garden gnome, Gabe has lived in Atlanta his whole life. He had a reoccurring dream he could fly as a child. Gardening is the closest substitute he can find. In addition to dirt-digging with his mom since he was a wee lad, he now has 7 years of formal farming experience. He is currently the main person managing atplanta's daily affairs.
Our Extended Family Tree
Other people who helped make this thing happen:
Azhar
Original ideator and co-founder, Azhar grew up in Texas but spent a great deal of time in Atlanta thanks to his family ties. His experiments in the civic enterprise world in college led to his idea for atplanta. Azhar is currently traveling the world, hoping to bring new learnings back to Atlanta.
Bria
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Bria is atplanta's designer. She did the art and website. She likes collecting fish poop to water her little indoor jungle and one day hopes to have a big sunny backyard full of atplanta gardens.
Deborah​
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Deborah's social media and marketing expertise helped us out a ton. A digital storyteller and lover of all things food, she grew up with a passion for gardening and farming. She thinks about how best to reconnect black and brown folks to the land and tends an atplanta garden on her property!
Mariyah
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Atplanta's second garden resident, Mariyah is a movement organizer, Enneagram enthusiast / educator, and full-time vibe curator. She's passionate about abolition and anti-capitalism, and she joined atplanta because of her interest in building community around issues of food and land sovereignty.
Ananda​
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Ananda was atplanta's first garden resident. After four years in the video production industry, they are now a budding mycologist (mushroom scientist) who loves not only being in the soil - but also cooking up what the earth shares with us.
Johnna
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Johnna helped with garden installations, seedling care, building out relationships with partners, and exploring cooperative models for atplanta. She's worked in early childhood education, conservation, and community organizing. They’re passionate about how gardening can bring us closer to each other, our land, and our histories.
What's a civic enterprise?
A la Wagenaar & van der Heijden: "Social production and civic enterprise produce social goods (public services and products) in a democratic way (non-hierarchical, sustainable, responsive to local and individual needs). Thus, they form an alternative to the traditional social production system of democratic capitalism in which large centralized firms, largely insulated from democratic control, provide mass-produced goods to consumers with little or no voice in the production system." (2015, p. 126.)
