Education · Community · Programs
How TigerMountain Grows More Than Gardens
When Darren Chapman founded TigerMountain Foundation in 2007, the vision was straightforward: take the vacant lots sitting empty across South Phoenix and turn them into something the community could actually use. What grew from that idea — quite literally — became a network of gardens, a workforce pipeline, and a model for community development that’s still expanding today.
Here’s a look at what that model is built on, and what it was already producing by the time 2019 came to a close.
The Foundation: Asset Based Community Development
Everything TigerMountain does is rooted in a framework called Asset Based Community Development — ABCD for short. The core idea is simple: every community already has strengths worth building on. Our job isn’t to arrive with outside solutions. It’s to help people identify what they already have and put it to work.
In practice, that means we don’t run programs for the community. We build them with it.
Community Gardening: A Classroom Without Walls
From day one, the garden has been at the center of everything. Not just as a place to grow food — though it does that well — but as a space where life skills take root alongside the vegetables.
Across our South Phoenix garden sites, here’s what a typical season looks like:
- Residents plant, tend, and harvest produce for their own households — putting fresh food on tables in neighborhoods that often have none nearby
- Participants learn what it means to show up consistently, work as part of a team, and take pride in the results of their labor
- Surplus produce goes to farmer’s markets across the Valley, with all proceeds reinvested directly into TMF’s programs
- Every 2nd and 4th Saturday, the gardens come alive with a mix of hands-on learning, small-scale farming, and arts programming — drawing youth, adults, and seniors together in a space that’s as much about community as it is about cultivation
The goal behind all of it is the same: build work ethic, financial literacy, and entrepreneurial thinking in people who’ve often been told those things aren’t available to them.
Landscaping: Where Training Becomes a Career
The garden teaches the fundamentals. The landscaping program is where participants take those skills into the real world.
TigerMountain’s landscaping crew provides services to homeowners and businesses throughout the Phoenix metro — property cleanups, landscape design and installation, irrigation system work, monthly maintenance, and agriscaping. Participants earn their experience on real jobs, with real clients, producing real results.
Every dollar generated by both the landscaping and gardening operations is reinvested back into the community. The program pays for itself while it pays it forward.
Where Things Stood at the End of 2019
By the close of 2019, TigerMountain had mentored more than 1,100 volunteers and participants — along with their families — and reached thousands more through community events and speaking engagements. Over 10,000 meals had been provided through our gardens and programming.
Those numbers represented more than a decade of work proving out a model that, at the start, was just a founder with a vision and a vacant lot.
The Work Continues
The programs described here have kept growing since this was first written — more garden sites, more participants, more meals, more careers launched. But the foundation hasn’t changed: trust the community, build on its strengths, and plant something that lasts.
Want to be part of what’s growing? [Volunteer with us →] or [Support our work →]