Karen Rutberg has worked in urban agriculture and community gardening for more than a decade, becoming a Master Gardener and building on her experience managing and leading complex projects as a city planner and geographer.
From working to re-house unhoused families to overseeing a multi-year, multimillion dollar contract to digitize New York City’s sewer map, Karen has been committed to collaborative, high-quality work, sustainable economic, social and environmental well-being, and social responsibility.
From the start, Karen has recognized the powerful role urban agriculture plays in enhancing individual and community health and food security through environmental stewardship.
In the 1990s, she helped organize and develop funding for community gardens in the South Bronx. She joined with others to find and secure land and tools, plant, weed and harvest by hand, and defend urban gardens as open spaces essential to the community’s own vision for its development. There were gardens where neighbors grew the fruits and vegetables native to their cultures. There was a garden created by and for women that grew medicinal herbs and plants needed to provide traditional remedies for women’s healthcare. These valuable urban green spaces included urban farm plots with casitas and neighborhood gathering places that continue to enrich the South Bronx and other urban communities today.
In recent years, Karen’s work has continued with a focus on growing produce to address local food insecurity in South Orange-Maplewood and Newark, New Jersey.
At the South Orange Elks Rent Party Garden, for 8 years she has directed the efforts of dozens of volunteers and in 2022 they grew more than 3,000 pounds of produce. Distributed through local food pantries and free farm markets, this harvest supplemented the nonperishable canned and boxed food with fresh fruits and vegetables, helping neighbors in need put healthier meals on their tables.
At the Hawthorne Avenue Farm in Newark, from 2018 to 2020, Karen served as the manager of a 3-acre urban farm. Working alongside farmer Mark Kearney and local volunteers, she took on a unique set of challenges of working at a scale larger than a community garden and smaller than a typical farm. She introduced irrigation, complementary planting, succession planting and cover cropping to an operation that had previously been managed largely by hand and with inconsistent planning. Identifying and implementing best practices in soil management, integrated pest management, and farm design enabled Karen and Mark to more than double the productive capacity of the farm. These efforts also improved its year-round use and long-term sustainability. She and the farmer changed the direction of the rows to take account of the prevailing wind and slope of land. They built a greenhouse shed to enable seed starting on-site.
Karen drew on her experience in community development and city planning to undertake outreach to a broad variety of resource partners at the federal, state, and local level and to make connections to a variety of private sources of support. For instance, the Natural Resources Conservation Service designed an irrigation system that Karen and Mark installed. She also secured $50,000 of new piping from a local water engineering company to upgrade the 250 community garden plots on the site from relying on a single hose to a network of convenient spigots.
In her years at community gardens and the farm, Karen has discovered how her professional knowledge, her penchant for connecting to others, and her continuous drive to learn and grow are critical to the success of the urban agriculture work which is her passion.
Today, Karen continues to grow the South Orange Elks Rent Party Garden and is creating a permaculture garden and teaching space at her home in Montclair, New Jersey.