Your Neighborhood, Your Destiny
REIMAGINE THIS SPACE
Join our mission to revitalize urban spaces through native plant gardening and community engagement. We empower volunteers to transform neighborhoods—starting with gardens that beautify, support local ecology, and inspire lasting change.
Get your hands dirty in a Weed Warrior session, learn about low-maintenance landscaping, and share a meal as we build a greener, more connected community—one garden at a time.
Christopher Loren Thompson - lead gardener.
With a lifelong background as a naturalist rooted in childhood experiences—shaped by my father’s work as an ornithologist at the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin—I have cultivated a passion for native plants and ecological stewardship.
Over the past five years, I’ve tended my own native plant garden, closely observing its transformation and deepening my understanding of native ecosystems.
Recognize this plan? It’s an invasive called Canadian Thistle. (By the way, it’s not from Canada.)
My professional journey includes collaborating with the MSU School of Landscape Architecture on design projects, and I now oversee the native plant garden at the Allen Neighborhood Center, a Lansing-based nonprofit dedicated to community enrichment.
Drawing on this diverse experience, I offer a hands-on native plant gardening session: a 30-minute “Weed Warrior” experience focused on weed identification and extraction, followed by a community meal from the Rathburn Accelerator—inviting others to learn, connect, and foster stewardship of our natural spaces.
Pictured here: a native Harebell.
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Ready to take the next step? You can become a contributor to our cause, or participate yourself.