Badger Rock Neighborhood Center
A place to gather and connect
Badger Rock provides seasonal, summer youth, and special activities programming, often with local partners and at low or no cost to participants. These programs help neighbors enrich their lives through pursuit of new skills and interests, as well as form connections with the neighborhood. Our goal with all of our programming is to strengthen community ties and civic engagement while also nurturing resilience within each individual.
Badger Rock Neighborhood Center
The Badger Rock Neighborhood Center hosts community events, workshops, a free monthly dinner and seasonal market, and provides a space for the community to gather for meetings or programs.
The Badger Rock Neighborhood Center is co-located with Badger Rock Middle School and Lori Mann Carey Elementary School (formerly Southside). Rooted partners with Badger Rock Middle School to offer a weekly culinary arts and gardening class, an after-school cooking club, a Saturday School program, and a Social Entrepreneurship Class in partnership with CEOs of Tomorrow. Rooted also offers our Rooted in Culture Gardening and Cooking Class with Lori Mann Carey Elementary weekly during the school year and three times a week during the summer.
Badger Rock Neighborhood Center offers a bi-weekly food pantry for over 100 families in partnership with Badger Rock Middle School and Second Harvest Food Bank.
Badger Rock is also home to the Badger Rock Community Gardens and Badger Rock Urban Farm green spaces, which have become a cornerstone for neighborhood connection and self-reliance. These gardens exist because Rimrock and Southside community residents advocated for and supported the creation of a safe, vibrant place where they and their families could grow food, share knowledge, and build community together. Today these gardens remain a living symbol of that vision, offering a place where neighbors of all ages can learn, work the soil, and enjoy the fruits of their labor side by side.
Badger Rock is the primary site for our Rooted in Urban Agriculture Youth Employees, who are involved with all aspects of running the Urban Farm, assist with youth programming, staff community events, and undertake a variety of hands-on projects.
For more information, please contact us:
Address: 517 E. Badger Road, Madison WI, 53713
Phone: (608) 960-4615
Email: [email protected]
Or visit our regularly updated Facebook page.
How it started
In 2009, the Center for Resilient Cities (now Rooted) began work on the Resilience Research Center (RRC) at a site in the Moorland-Rimrock neighborhood, applying lessons learned from our work in Milwaukee to South Madison. In 2012 we opened the RRC, which was home to Badger Rock Neighborhood Center, Badger Rock Middle School (a public, instrumentality charter school primarily serving children from the surrounding severely economically distressed neighborhood), and the urban farm operations, led by Growing Power Madison at the time.
Since that time the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center has been a community hub and urban agriculture space for people of all ages. With year-round programming focused on community leadership and voice, neighbors and other community members can gather, participate, build connections, share their talents and find culturally relevant offerings.
The Badger Rock Neighborhood Center has had to evolve during the Center for Resilient Cities merger with Community Groundworks to form Rooted, the Covid pandemic, and the construction of Lori Mann Carey Elementary and remodeling of the neighborhood center space. Throughout that time, Rooted staff has listened, learned and evolved with the needs of the community and adjusted neighborhood center offerings to meet those needs. This mission of community-led programming continues as neighborhood needs shift, change and grow.
