Kathy Lewis ’79, ’93: Creating Community Through Gardening

For Kathy Lewis ’79, ’93, the coming of spring heralds another season of Blocks in Bloom, or BiB.

The organization is entering its 13th year in 2026 and continues to create gardens in the inner-city neighborhoods of Rochester, NY while strengthening communities.

Lewis has spent a lifetime working to make people’s lives better, whether organizing volunteers, writing for an alternative newspaper, or combating lead in the city’s older housing stock. 

By the time she retired in 2013, she was armed with contacts and a talent for improving communities. “I wanted to use what I had to continue giving back and making the community a better place,” she says. “But I wanted to do it in a way that fulfills my passions.” 

She knew she never wanted to write another grant proposal nor get involved in activities that were “meeting heavy.”  Instead, she wanted to combine one of her passions — gardening — with community organizing.
“So many things divide us in this small world, but growing plants is the opposite,” she says. “It is something that almost everyone likes to do.”

Bonding Over Flowers

Lewis got her bachelor’s in social theory from SUNY Empire in 1979 and a master’s in business and policy studies in 1993. She spent years working for the United Way and the Center for Community Health at the University of Rochester. 

After retirement, Lewis became a Master Gardener with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County. In 2014, she launched BiB. Her goals were three-fold: to strengthen community bonds, beautify neighborhoods, and teach participants how to garden. 

Together with another Master Gardener, Lewis enlisted two “block captains” in two lower-resourced neighborhoods. The captains in turn, rounded up 15 households. As mentors, Lewis and her friend taught the neighborhood volunteers how to create garden plots filled with hardy perennials that would come back every year. 

Like the flowers themselves, the idea blossomed. As the program grew, the need for more volunteers did too. Lewis broke her “no grants” rule to secure funding from the Rochester Garden Club to train former block captains to become mentors for other blocks, and some became Master Gardeners. 

“This brought people from lower resourced neighborhoods into the master gardener program and diversified us economically, racially, and ethnically,” she says. 

Soon, other partners were involved. The city of Rochester provided compost and mulch, while local gardeners and nurseries donated “tough as nails perennials” such as black-eyed Susans, coneflowers, and shasta daisies. 

Taking Root and Spreading

By 2025, BiB had spread to 107 blocks and involved 1,123 households in lower-resourced neighborhoods. Many of the mentors now are not Master Gardeners, just people who participated in the program. And the need for plants has grown to roughly 1,500 perennials a year. 

The project has resulted in friendships and community efforts that have helped transform neighborhoods. “One block removed a vacant house where people were drug dealing,” Lewis says “Another block got the city to plant trees. Yet another convinced the city to install speed bumps. And another turned a scrubby dead end filled with weeds into a mini park.” 

Neighbors have also gotten more social. Some blocks have started doing annual cookouts; others have revived block parties. 

For their efforts, BiB has won numerous awards including the International Convention of Master Gardeners award for “innovative project;” the Community Greening Award from the American Horticultural Society; and a civic improvement commendation from the Garden Club of America. 

Lewis says her vision is to grow the program elsewhere.  “Once a community agrees to a few basic tenets, we let people know that they can have our model,” Lewis says. “They can have the logo, the flyers, and the training manual for mentors. It’s yours to make work for your community.”