Growing Together: SISTAMoms & Maxwell Street Community Garden

At Maxwell Street Community Garden, we believe a garden is more than a place to grow food—it’s a space to cultivate community, healing, and opportunity. To bring this story to life, we sat down with Yvonne Monique Livingston, founder of SISTAMoms and a Maxwell Street gardener since 2019 (Plot 58). Yvonne helped author this reflection on how SISTAMoms and the garden have come together to nurture both people and place.

A Vision Rooted in Transformation

SISTAMoms is not a traditional service agency or social group. Instead, it is a collaborative model built on equity, ethics, and Ubuntu, designed to support people in breaking free from systemic cycles of poverty and neglect. Their work combines healing practices with entrepreneurial strategies—offering mentorship, structure, and accountability to individuals ready to transform their lives and communities.

One of SISTAMoms’ greatest accomplishments has been creating a community-rooted business-to-business model that blends economic empowerment with trauma-informed support and storytelling. This approach reframes poverty as a structural issue, not a personal failure, and focuses on building pathways toward resilience, opportunity, and systemic change.

The Garden as a Sanctuary

Our partnership began in 2024 with the Village Garden Program, and has since blossomed into a series of Summer Socials every Friday. These gatherings transformed the garden into a sanctuary:

• Children played freely in a safe and nurturing environment

• Elders shared wisdom and stories from lived experience

• Entrepreneurs showcased their products and dreams

• Neighbors connected, laughed, and built relationships across generations

The Maxwell Street Community Garden became a living classroom and healing ground, proving how powerful green space can be in fostering connection, creativity, and hope.

Looking Ahead: Growing the Partnership

As we look to the future, SISTAMoms envisions our partnership expanding into a strategic collaboration that centers nature as a tool for transformation. Together, we hope to:

• Use the garden as a pilot site for trauma-informed business incubation and intergenerational healing

• Develop a year-round calendar of healing circles, mentoring, food education, and community events

• Establish equitable funding models to support stipends for youth, vendors, and elders who bring life and knowledge to the garden

• Create joint media projects that document and uplift the voices and experiences of our community

Most importantly, SISTAMoms reminds us that the garden is not just a patch of green in the city. It’s a gateway to economic mobility, mental wellness, and collective liberation.

Growing Together

In only two years, our partnership has already deepened ties across the neighborhood and opened doors for new opportunities. We are excited to keep growing—side by side with SISTAMoms and our community—toward a just, green, and thriving future.