At the end of 2024, CRECE Urban Farms partnered with Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Orange to steward Grace Community Farm, a shared space where land, faith, and community converge. Through this collaboration, the congregation offers its property for cultivation while CRECE brings its farming expertise and community-organizing roots, honed since 2016 at its original site in Santa Ana, to build a garden that serves the broader Orange neighborhood. Though CRECE operates on church-owned land, it runs its own programming independently, shaping the farm’s youth education, community events, and food-access work according to its own mission and priorities.

At Grace Community Farm, CRECE continues its work of growing healthy food for people facing food insecurity, while also creating space for hands-on learning, cultural connection, and intergenerational gathering. The site hosts volunteer days, workshops, and public events open to the wider community, and gives Our Saviour’s Children’s Center expanded opportunities for outdoor, garden-based education. The farm is open to volunteers and visitors two days a week, welcoming anyone who wants to learn, lend a hand, or simply spend time outdoors among the crops.

This partnership reflects CRECE’s broader approach to building a more equitable, community-owned food system across Orange County: pairing its expertise in sustainable urban agriculture and food justice with the goodwill and physical space that partner institutions can offer, while preserving CRECE’s independence in how it runs its programs. Grace Community Farm stands as an example of what’s possible when land access and community-rooted farming work meet in service of a shared goal — healthier, more connected neighborhoods.