Our story is about multiple generations of community members coming together to create green space and beauty from the rubble of a home destroyed by fire in the early 1980s.

The Walt L. Shamel Community Garden, established in the mid 1980s and renovated and renamed in 2004, is a lush GreenThumb garden and community space in Crown Heights run by members and volunteers. Named in honor of a garden steward and extraordinary neighbor, Walt “Mr. Lenny” Shamel, our garden features native plants, raised beds for growing herbs, vegetables, and flowers, a thriving composting operation, and a flock of chickens. Last year we created a bioswale filled with beautiful native plants to capture rainwater runoff. We are a space to (re)connect to nature in your neighborhood and re-energize from the constant buzz of city life.

We grow community! Friendships form, and marriages, partnerships, births, and graduations have been celebrated here. Deaths of loved ones have been memorialized. Visual artists and musicians have delighted and nourished the community with their creative works for decades. This is a place, too, where people have come together to imagine and work toward a more just and loving world.

This is your space! We ask for your help to ensure that our work can continue to flourish.

As we arrive into our 2025 gardening season, we aspire to make many improvements! We are concurrently raising funds to build a new and improved chicken coop, update the gravel pathway around the garden to make it fully accessible, and access a generator to provide electricity for events and workshops.

We write and are awarded grants regularly, but our material costs exceed our current resources. So we are looking to you, our neighbors and community! We hope that your enjoyment of the garden as a local, well-kept green space will inspire you to donate to our GoFundMe.