A food system we grow ourselves.

The Grow Collective is a community-led research pilot putting food production back in the hands of the people — seed-funded by Morgan State University's Morgan CARES program and built block by block in Park Heights.

Why Now?

A program can be removed with a single vote.
A food system the community grows itself can't be.

The Country

42 Million

Americans — one in eight — lost SNAP food assistance last fall, the first interruption in the program's 60-year history (USDA, Nov 2025).

The Law

$186 Billion

cut from food assistance — the largest reduction in the program's history (CBO, 2025).

Baltimore

90,750

city residents are food insecure — nearly double the national rate (Maryland Food Bank, 2025).

Park Heights

31%

of Black residents live in a Healthy Food Priority Area, against 9% of white residents — conditions set long before the shutdown.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

The Grow Collective

Residents grow food themselves — indoors and out — and grow it together. Each household runs two growing environments: indoor microgreens and outdoor container crops. The Langston Hughes Community, Business, and Resource Center in Park Heights anchors it all — a production, education, and activation site with indoor vertical systems, garden beds, and 14 fruit trees already in the ground.

Growing is where it starts. The network is the system. A working food system needs more than people with seeds — and there's a role here for everyone, no matter what you bring.

Residents shape the model, choose the crops, and own what the work produces — food, skills, and a share of the surplus. No role carries more weight than another.

SIX POINTS OF CHANGE

What we hope growing together can build.

This is what the pilot sets out to examine — whether a neighborhood that grows its own food sees change well beyond the plate.

🫱🏾‍🫲🏼

Connection & mental health

Less isolation, more support. Growing together moves people away from individualistic thinking and toward looking out for each other.

🛡️

Safer blocks

Spaces that are tended and watched feel different to live on. Active, cared-for sites stabilize a block.

🌎

Climate & environment

More green space and living soil where there was concrete and vacant lots — and food grown here instead of shipped in.

🥬

Better health

Fresh food grown at home and on the block — in a neighborhood served by fewer than two full-service grocery stores, where most people leave just to buy groceries.

🔑

Ownership

The beds, the skills, and the knowledge stay in the neighborhood. The block owns the food system — it's not run for them, it's run by them.

🌿

Resilience

Last fall, 42 million people lost SNAP overnight. Food you grow with your neighbors can't be cut off that way.

THE RESEARCH PILOT

Community-led research, not research done to a community

Seed-funded by Morgan State University's Morgan CARES program and led in partnership with Dr. Glenda Lindsey, The Grow Collective is a community-based participatory research pilot examining whether a dual-environment home food production model functions as an intervention — improving food security, dietary behavior, growing knowledge, and collective efficacy. Baseline and follow-up assessments capture the change. Crop selection, engagement format, and co-op governance are shaped by resident input, not assumed in advance. Findings will inform the case to extend the intervention to additional Park Heights households.

10 Households to be served

2 growing environments per home

2 assessment points: baseline + follow-up

1 community center as the education activation hub

Quandra Gray

Founder & Chief Cultivator,
What The Sprout

“What started as a vertical farm has become something bigger — a place where we're testing what community agriculture infrastructure actually looks like. Fruit trees, grow beds, a vertical farm, a pantry, pollinator gardens — all of it designed so this community can lead its own food future.”

WHO'S BEHIND IT?

Quandra Gray Quandra Gray is the founder of What The Sprout LLC, a Baltimore-based community food production company. She grew up on Baltimore's west side and came back to build what was never there — food production, education, and connection in neighborhoods that lost it to decades of disinvestment.

850+ community members served through agriculture education and food production
MBE / DBE / SBE / WBE Certified business
Designed and installed the growing systems, beds, and orchard at Langston Hughes
Active workshop contract with the YMCA of Central Maryland
Case Management Certificate — UMD School of Social Work / United Way
Americorp member

The west side shaped Quandra long before this work did. The fear and uncertainty she grew up around are the same forces driving what she builds now — a neighborhood where food, safety, and stability aren't left to chance. Read her story →