The Pontiac Community Garden Network held a harvest celebration Saturday marking the expansion of its urban agriculture program to 14 active sites across the city, a milestone that organizers say has transformed more than four acres of vacant city-owned lots into productive food-growing spaces that together provided fresh produce to approximately 3,000 families during the 2025 growing season.

Founded in 2019 with a single half-acre lot on Auburn Avenue, the network has grown steadily under the leadership of executive director Naomi Williams into one of the most successful community food security initiatives in Oakland County, combining individual garden plots for residents with larger production beds maintained by community volunteers and youth gardeners from the Pontiac School District.

This year’s expansion added four new sites, including a 0.7-acre lot on Telegraph Road that serves as the network’s first “teaching garden” — a space designed specifically for programming with elementary and middle school students during the school year and summer months. More than 280 students participated in garden-based learning programming in 2025, learning principles of soil science, plant biology, nutrition, and environmental sustainability through hands-on work in the beds.

“Food access in Pontiac has been a real challenge for decades, but these gardens are doing something beyond just providing vegetables,” Williams said at Saturday’s celebration. “They’re creating connections between neighbors, giving young people a relationship with where food comes from, and transforming places that were empty and blighted into something that belongs to this community.”

The network distributed approximately 42,000 pounds of produce in 2025, with priority given to families below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Surplus produce not distributed directly to families was donated to Forgotten Harvest, the regional food bank serving Metro Detroit, which collected regular donations from seven of the network’s sites throughout the summer and fall harvest season.

Funding for the network comes from a combination of Oakland County Community Development Block Grant allocations, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development’s Specialty Crop Block Grant, individual donations, and a three-year partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s Healthy Communities Foundation.

Plans for 2026 include the addition of three more sites and the launch of a 12-week urban agriculture training program for adult residents interested in developing food production skills for personal use or small-scale market gardening.