After a very difficult 2023 — losing my mother, receiving my own cancer diagnosis, and moving through treatment — I found myself slowly rebuilding my sense of rhythm, purpose, and connection. Music helped me breathe again. Art helped me notice beauty again. Community helped me remember that healing is not something we do alone.
Read More"We're seeing communities think more like systems," said Karen Gordon, founder of Growing Augusta and publisher of Urban Pro Weekly. "A farmers market isn't just about food anymore. It's also about entrepreneurship, public health, neighborhood development and community gathering. The same project is serving multiple purposes."
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Data centers generate significant heat. Growing Augusta could explore a pilot greenhouse, seedling nursery, or propagation space that uses recovered or redirected heat from the facility. Even if full heat reuse is too complex at first, the partnership could begin with an on-site or adjacent controlled-environment agriculture demo supported by the data center’s sustainability team.
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The communities that thrive over the next decade may not be the ones with the biggest budgets, the newest buildings, or the most elaborate strategic plans. They may be the ones that learn how to connect what they already have. And that is a different way to think about growth.
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In 2025, Georgia launched Teach in the Peach, a statewide initiative that celebrates students choosing careers in education. Watching future teachers publicly recognized for their commitment made me wonder:
What if we did something similar for agriculture?
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Programs like this do more than teach technical skills. They help students stretch, grow, and discover capacity they did not know they had.
Sometimes all it takes is one teacher willing to say, “I think you can do this.”
And sometimes, the student believes them.
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Before you ask people to invest their labor in a teaching farm, invest time in building the systems that support them.
Inside you'll find governance tools, startup checklists, readiness assessments, onboarding systems, agreements, community engagement strategies, operational frameworks, and perhaps most importantly, lessons learned from observing a teaching farm launch in real time.
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Across the arts, organizations are navigating change, restructuring, budget challenges, and venue shifts. But the Greater Augusta Arts Council continues to model resilience and creativity - finding ways to adapt while keeping artists and community at the center.
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