Chefs in the Garden 2024

Growing Hope Announces Return of Chefs in the Garden Fundraiser with Two-Night Dinner Series

YPSILANTI, Mich. (July 2024) – Growing Hope is thrilled to announce the return of the beloved Chefs in the Garden fundraiser, set to take place on Sept. 15, 2024, and Sept. 22, 2024, at the Growing Hope Farm in Ypsilanti. Beginning at 5 pm each evening, the two-part dinner series featuring celebrated chefs Kiki Louya and Ji Hye Kim will offer an experience of local farm-to-table food and encourage support for strengthening our local food system. In addition to the memorable dining experience, attendees will enjoy auctions, raffles, and live entertainment.

After a break in 2023, guests can expect to experience the first Chefs in the Garden joint fundraiser with the partnership of Detroit Food Academy on Sept. 15th. Both organizations share a mission for youth programming in local food systems through culinary arts, sustainable farming, entrepreneurship, education, and leadership in local communities. The evening will feature a three-course dinner with dessert, prepared by Chef Kiki Louya, recognized as one of “16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America” by the New York Times and other notable chefs from Detroit Food Academy. Working alongside teen program participants from Detroit Food Academy and Growing Hope, this collaboration showcases culinary talent and highlights the importance of youth engagement in food systems.

Growing Hope is delighted to welcome back Chef Ji Hye Kim, award-winning chef/owner of Miss Kim in Ann Arbor. Known for her food rooted in Korean tradition and adapted to showcase Michigan’s bountiful produce, her family-style meal will shine seasonally and locally. Her return to Chefs in the Garden is highly anticipated, as she is committed to prioritizing fair wages, benefits, and equity in the industry and has participated in programs like James Beard Chef Boot Camp for Policy Change and Food Lab Detroit’s Fellowship for Change in Food and Labor.

Tickets for each evening of Chefs in the Garden will be available starting July 29. Tickets for the Sept. 15 event with Chef Kiki Louya are priced at $150, and tickets for the Sept. 22 event with Chef Ji Hye Kim are priced at $125. All proceeds from the Sept. 15 event will support Detroit Food Academy and Growing Hope’s efforts in empowering Detroit and Ypsilanti youth. “I am beyond excited to host these phenomenal, mission-minded chefs at our farm this season; I think our community is in for a truly transformational meal.” -Julius Buzzard, Executive Director.

You can purchase tickets for September 15 with Detroit Food Academy and September 22 with Chef Ji Hye Kim online on or after July 29.

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Georgia Gilmore & The Club From Nowhere

By Julius Buzzard • February 18, 2026

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when formal fundraising was surveilled and criminalized, Georgia Gilmore organized something deceptively simple: a kitchen network . Known as The Club From Nowhere , Gilmore and other Black women sold pies, cakes, and home-cooked meals to quietly raise money for the movement. Their anonymity was protection. Their food was infrastructure. For over a year, as the boycott stretched on, these funds paid for carpools, gas, and daily survival. While history often centers on speeches and marches, Gilmore reminds us that revolutions are sustained behind the scenes by those who feed people, organize logistics, and keep the lights on. Her kitchen was a site of resistance. Her recipes were tools of liberation. At Growing Hope, we honor this lineage every time we invest in food entrepreneurs, incubator kitchens, and cooperative models. When food businesses are community-rooted, they do more than generate income; they fuel movements . Never underestimate what food can do. And never forget who has always been doing the work.

Fannie Lou Hamer & the Freedom Farm Cooperative

By Julius Buzzard • February 11, 2026

“If you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around.” Fannie Lou Hamer said this not as a metaphor, but as a lived experience. In 1969, after being evicted from her plantation home for registering to vote, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The goal was simple and radical: Black families deserved land, food, housing, and economic independence, without having to ask permission. Freedom Farm grew vegetables, raised livestock, built homes, and supported cooperative ownership. It addressed hunger and poverty at their roots, refusing the lie that liberation could come without material security. Hamer understood what we still grapple with today: political rights mean little without food sovereignty . Voting doesn’t protect you from hunger. Legislation doesn’t replace land. Dignity requires access to the means of survival. This is why Growing Hope centers farming, education, and entrepreneurship together. Food sovereignty is not just about what’s on your plate; it’s about who controls the systems that decide who eats .

The Black Panther Party & Free Breakfast

By Julius Buzzard • February 4, 2026

In 1969, the Black Panther Party launched the Free Breakfast for Children Program , serving tens of thousands of children across the United States every single school day. Not as an act of charity, but as a declaration. The Panthers understood something the dominant systems refused to acknowledge: a hungry child cannot learn, organize, or imagine a future . Feeding children was a political act. It was protection. It was strategy. Volunteers cooked before dawn in church basements and community centers. Children were served breakfast while learning about Black history, self-determination, and collective responsibility. The state noticed and felt threatened. The FBI labeled the program “the greatest threat” to internal security, not because it was violent, but because it worked. And it worked so well that the U.S. government was forced to expand public school breakfast programs nationwide . Mutual aid didn’t just meet immediate needs; it reshaped public policy . This is food sovereignty in action: communities identifying harm, meeting their own needs with dignity, and building power in the process. At Growing Hope, we carry this legacy forward. When we insist on dignified access to food, when we support farmers markets as sites of connection and not extraction, when we center youth and Black leadership, we are walking a well-worn path. When communities feed themselves, systems change.

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