In a world of instant gratification, there’s something to be said for things that grow steadily over time — like a well-tended garden. And just like a garden requires patience, care, and dedication to showing up, so does the level of teamwork needed to create lasting change across communities. For the last three years, Love, Tito’s, the philanthropic heart of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, has supported The Nashville Food Project as part of its Block to Block program, with each project building on the last to work toward community food security in Nashville.
One of our core values at the Food Project is hospitality, which we understand in part as investing in building relationships, acknowledging that this takes time. The Love, Tito’s Block to Block program has embodied this value over the last three years, consistently galvanizing groups of volunteers to get involved with community agriculture and offering long-term infrastructure support to accommodate even more growers and their families. In doing so, the folks at Tito’s are achieving their own goals to help make fresh, healthy food more accessible.
“We’re so grateful to have had the chance to work alongside The Nashville Food Project these last three years, helping this incredible organization further cultivate community and increase access to fresh food through the greater Nashville area. Our Love, Tito’s Block to Block program is all about bringing community together — one block at a time — and The Nashville Food Project team is truly doing that for our city.””
In 2022, Tito’s helped us install blueberry bushes and an educational pavilion at The Community Farm at Mill Ridge, helping to make the space hospitable for the multigenerational families that grow there. Last year’s efforts were focused on adding a greenhouse at another community agriculture site, the Growing Together farm, where farmers from immigrant and refugee backgrounds grow food sold via a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model to local families.
2024 marked a return to Mill Ridge to build on the work done in 2022. We gathered about 50 volunteers from both Tito’s and its local distributor, Lipman Brothers, at the farm. A quick show of hands indicated that a number of folks had returned for their second and even third year, giving up a morning to help us dig holes and shovel compost.
On a bright Friday morning, this fantastic bunch divided into groups to install a pollinator garden, prepare four large new garden beds, clear brush and brambles from a particularly thorny area of the farm to make way for a food forest, and paint rain barrels that act as a supplementary water supply to the entire farm. They did so with joyful attitudes and happy chatter — even though some of the projects were really hard!
On top of this day-of work, Tito’s is contributing to the long-term garden production at the farm by helping to expand infrastructure with support for a new greenhouse and a community refrigerator. The greenhouse will be used by Food Project staff to grow transplants for community members interested in at-home gardening, while also offering community gardeners the opportunity to use the space for their own transplants starting in the 2025 growing season. The outdoor local produce fridge will improve community members’ access to fresh produce grown at the farm, fostering greater access to locally grown, nutritious food.
The Community Farm at Mill Ridge is home to around 65 gardening families and hundreds of species of veggies, flowers, and herbs. While one side of the farm is dedicated to communal-style production that shares the entirety of its harvest with the community, the majority of the space is stewarded by individual plot holders, many of whom have limited access to land and resources to grow their own food. Thanks to Tito’s help, the entirety of the farm is now about three and a half acres, but there is room to grow — once the site is fully developed, it will be seven acres.
We hope to fully develop the space by 2027, and we’re grateful for Tito’s for bringing that hope within reach. Together, we’ve accomplished more than just expanding the farm — we’ve built a foundation for a more sustainable and equitable future in Nashville.
