Recyclers' Urban Farm Rainwater Harvesting

Sure We Can, in partnership with Artfully Unforgotten and Musgo, have started a 'Recyclers’ Farm - Garden' in Bushwick, built by repurposing salvaged disposable recyclables available on site.

Our main objective is to involve those who bring their cans and bottles daily to the center together with other neighbors -including the school located close to our site – in rediscovering our capacity as a community, to grow our own delicious fresh and healthy food through planting, harvesting and chicken-raising at a low cost.

We hope to do so while transforming what, otherwise, would be taken as garbage or waste into art, beauty and useful space.  This is part of our commitment of finding healthier and more sustainable ways of living in the midst of the vast city of NYC.

This is a follow-up project to our initial round of fundraising for the Recyclers' Urban Farm. This time we need to make a good rain system since there is no entrance of water in out lot; hence, we will need some additional help. We will build a rain water harvest system (there is no water in SWC site).  We also count with 5 Columbia University students who are very willing to do the installation.

This is part of our commitment to find a healthier and more sustainable way of living in the midst of huge cities like NYC.  Already Sure We Can is addressing the problem of excessive non-degradable 'waste' products, used and discarded in the city by collecting soda, water and beer containers, redeeming them and returning them to distributors. But because there are so many other non 'redeemable' containers, we want to find ways of using them artistically and effectively, as much as possible.  

On the other hand, most of us at SWC have previously been 'connected' to nature and in many cases to farming, but today we experience a total disconnect from the food we eat. The lack of accessibility to affordable local healthy food in our neighborhood is alarming. We want to empower our community to address this issue by growing nutritious, fresh and culturally-appropriate food at low cost while understanding both the beauty and responsibility that being interconnected with each other and with the earth means.