Our Story
A second chance. A second introduction.
The Chaotic Garden Project was not born in a boardroom or incubated through a fellowship. It was born from the specific, lived experience of what happens when systems fail people — and what one woman chose to build in response.
Where it started
Forsyth County doesn't forget. Ask Oprah.
In 2019, our founder found herself navigating the Forsyth County, Georgia legal system over a charge that carried a potential fifteen-year sentence. If you are unfamiliar with Forsyth County's history, Oprah Winfrey dedicated an episode of her show to it. The county's legacy of racial hostility is not incidental context. It is the context.
She was not incarcerated. She completed a first-time offender diversion, fulfilled every requirement, and moved forward. But moving forward, she discovered, is not the same as being allowed to move on. Doors that should have opened stayed closed. Opportunities that should have been hers were quietly redirected. She did what the system asked, and the system did not hold up its end.
So she kept moving. Through cities, through neighborhoods, through the particular exhaustion of watching the same failures repeat themselves in different zip codes: communities where people had lived beside each other for years without knowing each other's names, and where buying fresh vegetables required a car that most residents did not own. These were not accidents. They were the predictable outcomes of deliberate disinvestment and she was done waiting for someone else to address them.
The turning point
A second introduction.
She had been growing herbs and vegetables on her apartment balcony as a newly found hobby. For seven months, she and the neighbor next door exchanged little more than a hurried hello. Then one afternoon, she brought some of what she had grown to their door. That exchange became a real conversation. What followed was a friendship, and with it, a feeling she had not experienced in years — the particular warmth of a neighborhood that knows itself. She thought of her own childhood: the block that turned out when she left for prom, the neighbors who celebrated when she got her first car. Not organized events. Just people who were present for each other because that was simply what community meant. The herbs did not create that. They reminded her it had existed, and that it could again.
Hell — what better way to bring it back than with food? The cookout never died. The community around it did. We're bringing both back.
Why we exist
Two failures. One response.
Food access is a justice issue.
Food deserts are not the result of individual choices. They are the result of decades of redlining, municipal disinvestment, and the systematic removal of grocery infrastructure from Black and brown communities. The Chaotic Garden Project grows food where policy has failed to ensure it, and places it directly in the hands of the people who live there.
A record should not be a life sentence.
Our founder built this organization on the premise that a person's past should not permanently foreclose their future. Too many people complete every requirement the system asks of them and still find the door closed. The Chaotic Garden Project hires, trains, and pays returning citizens. We do not do this as charity, but as those with lived experiences that wants better for our justice impacted loved ones around us.
Community is built, not assumed.
The erosion of neighborhood cohesion is not inevitable. It is the result of conditions such aa economic precarity, housing instability, and the absence of shared space, that can be addressed. We use food as the infrastructure for reconnection. The garden is the reason to show up. What grows between people is the point.
What we believe
Rooted in this.
This is your garden too.
Whether you grew up in a neighborhood like ours, or you simply believe that people deserve better than what these systems have offered, there is a place for you here.