New York doesn’t have acres of land to grow fresh food. However, rooftop spaces can always be maximized to include growing fresh produce. Brooklyn Grange, the largest rooftop farm in NYC grows salad greens, rainbow chard, kale, basil, eggplant, cucumbers and ground cherries. This is one of the biggest projects funded by Mayor Bloomberg as part of the Green Infrastructure program that will help NYC become “a greener, greater city.”

Further down South (down under in Australia!) from where we call home is a group of like-minded individuals that share the value of going green through sprouting (literally) public edible gardens. Green Square Growers is an inspiring community that shares ideas such as how to create that strawberry vertical garden you never thought you could have as well as “how to green up your workspace.” Apart from their love and knowledge for gardening, they also know how to engage their community the right way. Let’s see how to do things the Green Square Growers way…

1. Who are the Green Square Growers?
We love growing food – at home and in public spaces. We are a local community group based in Green Square of Sydney, Australia and were founded in September 2011.

Basically we are all about sharing our knowledge of growing food with each other and others in the community. We also love installing public edible gardens that anyone in the community can access any time of the day.

2. How do you keep your community engaged, involved and excited to be a part of Green Square Growers?
We meet the 2nd Sunday of every month. Our meeting details are always shared on our Facebook page. Ironically our Facebook community is our local neighborhood community. We meet ‘offline’ to share knowledge, swap excess food produce, maintenance of the community gardens and to plan for future community gardens being installed. We encourage discussions to flow into the online space too.

3. Why did you create a Facebook brand page and why did you download the AA Static HTML app? How have these helped your organization?
We felt a Facebook page was a very simple way for the community to find out more about what we are doing and for our members to keep in touch with each other between catch ups.

We downloaded the AA Static HTML app to easily create a welcome page. We didn’t want a landing page as such (just happy for people to go straight to our wall). However once you arrive at our wall, you will be greeted with a large ‘hello’ button just under our cover photograph. The AA Static HTML app made it easy to create a multimedia welcome using text and video. This made it simple for people to know more about us and to inform them how they can get involved.

5. What advice can you give to other groups/organizations that want to succeed in their Facebook and inbound marketing efforts?
Encourage interaction online and offline and to take the time to welcome new visitors who click that wonderful ‘like’ button. Let people know your community group or business cares.