In order to increase awareness about urban agriculture in Louisville, the Louisville Urban Agricultural Coalition sponsored the Garden tents at the Louisville Free Public Library’s How-To Festival, a free public education event where people can come to attend 30 minute “TED”-style talks or activities.

The Louisville Urban Agriculture Coalition (UAC) was formed in 2017 by the Horticulture agent, Jefferson County Soil & Water Conservation District, Louisville Grows, Lots of Food; Common Earth Gardens, Americana World Community Center, The Food Literacy Project and interested citizens to provide a collaborate and communicative working group for all organizations in the city that focus on Urban Agriculture. As an effort to solidify the partnership, the group set the task of hosting an urban agricultural education event in 2018. Eventually, we decided to connect with the Louisville Public Library’s How-To Festival, as something of very similar format to what we were brainstorming and an event that each group had participated in independently in the past.

To bolster the Gardening portion of the How-To Festival, the UAC identified expert speakers from the community to provide a total of 6 hours of educational instruction around topics related to urban agriculture and sustainable living. The UAC also hosted a Seed Swap and information tent about the UAC and the organizations involved in the coalition. Through this event, the UAC reached over 3,000 new citizens and talked directly with over 500 people about Cooperative Extension and their services related to urban agriculture.

The UAC plans to repeat this event next year and will continue to build on the successful collaboration to develop larger-scale community-based educational programs in the future.