Native plant wild indigo benefits all the other things that grow around it by attracting beneficial insects and fixing the soil’s nitrogen. So it made perfect sense for Pastor John Creasy and the Rev. Evan Clendenin to give that name to their new initiative combating food insecurity.

The two co-founders of the Garfield Community Farm received a United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania Community Food Solutions $5,000 grant last year as they started their Wild Indigo Guild. They worked with four churches and groups of children and adults from each one to begin. 

That funding came in part through a $50,000 grant from Bayer Fund, which has supported the Community Food Solutions initiative for three years. The initiative unites local thought leaders and key stakeholders in the areas of healthy food and food security to collaborate in creating equitable access to healthy, affordable food, according to a news release. The program supports United Way’s efforts to help families across the region meet their basic needs, and since its inception, 51 community-led projects have been funded. In 2024, the initiative awarded $148,000 to 32 grantees.

The grant will support a large-scale food packing event this spring, bringing together 200 volunteers to provide more than 1,700 healthy meal boxes to local families. No specific date or location has been decided for that event yet, according to the United Way.

Creasy and Clendenin, an ordained Episcopalian priest who now lives in Tumwater, Washington, and helped lead the 2024 sessions virtually, started the Garfield Community Farm in 2008. The nonprofit works to bring food justice and ecological restoration to 3 acres of once-abandoned city land. Creasy said the Wild Indigo Guild is a progression of what they set out to do, and they starting developing it in 2023. The starting point: Churches most often are situated on large plots of land or have access to property, especially in urban settings. How could they transform that land into something beneficial for their members and the community?

Creasy is a founding pastor at The Open Door Church in Pittsburgh, part of the Presbyterian Church USA, and in addition to his work leading the Garfield farm staff, he is a team teacher for Pittsburgh’s Permaculture Design Course.

The introduction the churches’ members received this past fall was intentionally spiritual, he said. On the guild’s website, it explains that the eight-week first phase helps congregations and people of faith connect with God through nature and develop the tools to bring effective food justice, environmental justice and ecological restoration into faith practice.

“We’re looking to nature as our guide and our teacher,” he said. “That’s how I do the permaculture work that I do. I look at the relationships in the natural system and mimic that in our landscapes.” 

They looked first for similar ministries and made connections but couldn’t find anything similar to the goals they had set. So they designed the concept themselves.

Creasy said it has been termed a guild because as a group of people “we will benefit and grow from one another.”

He noted a number of wild indigo plant varieties exist, but he felt himself drawn to the wild indigo shrub. “If you grow it near an apple tree, it will fertilize the soil where it grows,” Creasy offered as an example.

In 2024 Wild Indigo Guild piloted the program with The Open Door Presbyterian Church, where Creasy is a pastor, at the Garfield Community Farm, as it doesn’t own a building. It worked also with Beulah Presbyterian Church in Churchill, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Greensburg and the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary summer youth institute. In 2025 it will continue to work with the Churchill and Greensburg churches, start a program at Waverly Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, and add an online guild anyone anywhere can join. The online guild will meet eight Monday nights starting Feb. 17. 

The churches pay Wild Indigo Guild a fee to participate, and Creasy and Clendenin, who wants to return to the Pittsburgh area, are working on other grants and partners to subsidize some churches on a sliding fee basis. The guild’s program is customizable, Creasy said, to the church’s needs. The church moves on to more phases, factoring in design work, plantings and growing food, then maintenance.

Property size varies in this year’s group, Creasy said. Once participants near the end of the first phase, “we start to dream together” about just that. Phases two and three in subsequent years are much more hands-on.

“Maybe the main thing we do is we connect them with God through nature, then find ways for them to live peacefully with nature and pursue restoration of creation,” Creasy continued. A big part of that discussion is thinking about the care any project involves and reminding participants they will have long-term relationships with the created spaces.  They ask if the projects are meant to be community endeavors involving not only church members but also neighbors to care for what they create.

Creasy and Clendenin encourage the churches to seek possible partners, connecting with people who want to grow their own food, too, and those that may have green space available if the church doesn’t.  “We are finding that churches get excited about not only them using their land but working with others as well,” he said.

That’s the way Garfield Community Farm began with aid from The Open Door Church and support from partners, including other churches, which has continued.

Pastor John Creasy (United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania)

Pastor Alex Ruzanic, director of youth and missional outreach at Beulah Presbyterian and leader of the church’s East End Youth Ministry nonprofit, is also on the Garfield Community Farm board. He has known Creasy since he was a junior youth group member at his first church in Pittsburgh and later as an intern as Creasy prepared for ministry.

Beulah Presbyterian is on 6 to 8 acres including wooded areas. It is the church on the hill from where the borough derived its name. Originally a Scottish soldiers’ barracks  before the Revolutionary War, the church is older than the country, Ruzanic said. It originated as a Scottish church in 1757, then was chartered in 1784 by the Presbyterian Church.

The church wants to create a food forest this year. The church had planted 25 pawpaw trees, which produce a fruit that tastes like banana and pear, several years back. Half are still alive, Ruzanic said, and it normally takes them about 10 to 12 years to bear fruit.

Food forests are defined as planned ecosystems that mimic a forest that grows food.  Instead of planting a tree with just green leaves, for example, creators select ones that produce nuts, berries, and roots people can eat, and plants that work together. That means picking trees that throw shade onto the plants below, enabling mushrooms and berries and more to flourish. 

The dilemma is choosing what is best for the church’s location and environment. That includes factoring in deer. “Deer eat everything!” Ruzanic said.

The adults interested in the guild last year discussed good environmental stewardship in the sessions, while the younger participants completed more practical, hands-on activities such as walking in the woods and some planting. The church has 300 members and averages 100 to 135 for weekly services.

The church members discussed getting rid of some of its grass-covered grounds that need to be mowed and turning some into wildflower fields. That will result in less maintenance and less invasive upkeep if properly established, Ruzanic said.

He said they learned last fall “that the world is a better place when we get it back to what it should be. Nature is a beautiful thing, and how can we be partners with nature than adversaries with it?”

So the next stage for Beulah Presbyterian is possibly some landscape and restoration work, with discussions, Ruzanic said, starting at the next meeting on Feb. 2. Ultimately the plan is for the Churchill group to become self-sustaining and have Creasy and Clendenin move on to other churches.

The Rev. Evan Clendenin (Wild Indigo Guild)

One connection the wild indigo made through the church’s East End Youth Ministry is a Plum family that has a farm and wants the guild to help them with plans for it. In exchange, the guild can possibly use it for gatherings and a tree nursery.

Creasy said the guild is looking to partner with Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light, a statewide nonprofit connected to a national organization. According to its website, the organization’s mission is to cultivate a religious response to the threat of climate change. “We see climate change as a moral issue, one that demands a response from people of faith,” it states.

That would include applying together for grants. Wild Indigo Guild can also apply for another United Way Community Food Solutions grant this year. That process opens Jan. 31 and closes March 3.  

Creasy said the guild met its goal financially, obtaining a few other small grants, too. Some people have become monthly donors to the program, and the leaders will seek more of those and foundation grants. Clendenin, who worked with the groups virtually and writes a blog on the Wild Indigo website, is working on returning to a Pittsburgh-area church, too. “Now that we have a year behind us, we can point to them and say see this works,” he said. 

Ruzanic said Beulah Presbyterian also has worked with Landforce, a nonprofit that has a mission of restoring the land and hires formerly incarcerated people and people who have been systematically excluded from career opportunities, for several years. The nonprofit built a trail for the church that links to the Churchill Valley Greenway.  “It’s been a wonderful partnership,” he said.

The church has several projects lined up for Landforce this year, including tree maintenance. The end goal? “We want to make our property a beautiful space that can be healthy and environmentally sustainable,” he said. “Be an example for others.”

Other United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania Community Food Solutions 2024 grant recipients: Abiding Missions, Bread of Life Food Pantry, Christopher’s Kitchen, Civically Inc., Garden City Food Pantry, Garfield Community Farm, Hilltop Urban Farm, Jamar Place of Peace, Jubilee International Ministries, Kincaid St. Garden, Lawrenceville United, Millvale Market, Mooncrest Neighborhood Programs /Hopebound Ministries, Natrona Comes Together Association, Pride Project Inc., Protect PT, Proud Haven, Rainbow Kitchen Community Services, Sampson’s Mills Cupboard Stretchers, South Side Community Council of Pittsburgh Inc., St. Mary Magdalene Ministry Center, The Larimer Consensus Group, This Generation Connect, Tree of Life Open Bible Church, Triumph Church, Union Baptist Church, Unity Baptist Church Food Bank, Urban Strategies Inc., ValleyView Presbyterian  Church, Worm Return LLC, and Youth Enrichment Association.

Applications for the 2025 round of United Way Community Food Solutions grants are available at: https://unitedwayswpa.org/grant-opportunities/community-food-solutions/.

A mature food forest that Pastor John Creasy designed at Garfield Community Farm. It serves as an example for Wild Indigo Guild projects. (United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania)

Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.

Helen Fallon

Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.