Ayanna-Grace is an urban farmer, digital organizer, and educator working at the intersection of community and environmental justice.
Based in Detroit, she organizes around energy democracy and air pollution in her 9–5, while advancing her vision through her business, The Urban Lorax. Through this work, she does garden consultations, leads hands-on trainings rooted in urban agriculture and environmental justice, and developed City Sprouts: A Youth-Run Urban Farm — a five-month program teaching children ages 5–9 to grow from seed to harvest using an environmental justice framework connecting soil health and air quality in age-appropriate ways.
Having double majored in Africana Studies and Gender Studies, Ayanna-Grace is skilled in utilizing research and analysis to revive dismissed or erased history. She applies this to her thought leadership by documenting patterns in the actions taken by those who stewarded land before her, learned through archival research. She combines these insights with her lived experience as a Black queer womxn farmer to speak at conferences, highlighting how urban agriculture is more than food. It is a tool for land restoration, stronger communities, and long-term systems change. She looks forward to contributing her experiences to the Change Collective and making a lasting impact with her cohort.
