2025 National GrowTogether Conference: Planting Seeds of Resilience

Free registration is now open for the 2025 National GrowTogether Conference: Planting Seeds of Resilience, Thursday, June 5 - Sunday, June 8 at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10016. This inspiring four-day gathering of community gardeners and leaders nationwide will celebrate the power of urban green spaces and community gardening in New York City. All activities are free and open to the public.

Please register in advance here.

Presented by NYC Parks GreenThumb in partnership with the American Community Gardening Association, Urban Garden Project, and with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Join us as we celebrate the resilience of our communities and cultivate a greener, healthier, and more connected future.

Conference Dates and Times
Please reserve tickets for each day you plan to attend by selecting "Get tickets".

• Thursday, June 5th from 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
  Workshops and panel discussions geared towards community gardening and urban agriculture organizations.
   
• Friday, June 6th from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
  Workshops and panel discussions geared towards community gardening and urban agriculture organizations.
   
• Saturday, June 7th from 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
  Workshops and panel discussions geared towards community gardeners and that promote resilience and innovation in urban gardening and community building.
   
• Sunday, June 8th – Off-site tours
  Join us for guided tours at GreenThumb community gardens, NYC Parks facilities, and other interesting urban green spaces across New York City. Keep an eye out for details and ticket information.

Stay tuned for schedule details!

Featuring Robin Wall Kimmerer as Keynote on Saturday, June 7th:

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals.

In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. Robin’s newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (November 2024), is a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s "On Being" with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.