29 Jul Revitalizing Southeast LA: A Community Resource Center & Urban Farm
LA Promise Fund is undertaking an exciting project in Southeast Los Angeles (SELA)—a Community Resource Center and an Urban Farm dedicated to promoting economic mobility, access to healthy food and nutrition, and wrap-around critical services.
The SELA communities of South Gate, Huntington Park, Maywood, Bell, and Florence-Graham are culturally rich but historically underserved. Median household income in South Gate sits over 26% below the state average, 95% of local students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 30% of residents are English learners navigating limited access to trust-centered support. Much of the area also functions as a food desert, cutting families off from fresh, nutrient-dense produce and deepening long-term health disparities.
To dismantle these barriers, we have secured an expert coalition of partners, including Ahmanson Foundation, Joseph Drown Foundation, Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, and W.M. Keck Foundation, and full site control to develop an integrated educational, economic, safety, and nutritional ecosystem split into two core physical infrastructure components:
• The Westbrook Academy Promise Center — a hyper-local hub co-locating multilingual parent education, physical and mental health counseling, immigration services, adult education, economic mobility courses, and an expanded food pantry moving thousands of pounds of food monthly.
• The SELA Urban Farm & Food System — a 5-to-7-acre working farm in South Gate featuring row crops, an orchard, animal sciences, and a teaching kitchen, supplying fresh produce directly into local schools, senior centers, and a “Food as Medicine” culture, while building a K-12-to-college workforce pathway in agriculture and culinary arts.
Together, these components form a scalable, self-sustaining model for regional equity—one built not just to meet urgent needs today, but to break generational cycles of poverty and food insecurity for good.
This project’s unique regional distribution model leverages produce grown locally to feed local schools, early childhood centers, senior citizens, and the broader South and Southeast LA community through partnerships with the LA Regional Food Bank, Seeds of Hope, CHIRLA, AltaMed, NEW Economics for Women, and others.
To learn more about partnership opportunities, please email advancement@lapromsiefund.org.
