VIDEO: Rooftop Gardens Program Offers At-Risk Youth a Path to a Brighter Future
November 12, 2025
DES MOINES, Iowa — An innovative program is offering at-risk youth and young adults experiencing homelessness a path toward a better future.
Rooftop Gardens is a Youth and Shelter Services (YSS) program and started in August 2024. It offers the chance for participants, aged 18-25, to gain soft skills, resume building, and career exploration through various methods.
The program calls the classes cohorts. Each cohort averages 10-15 people and lasts six months, January-June and July-December. They are a mixture of classroom experience that helps decide a career path and also work in the freight farm — a converted 40 ft. shipping container that grows produce year-round and gives a committed job opportunity to cohort participants.
“In six months, there’s a lot of work, expectations, codes of conduct, a lot of the things that people just find normal in their everyday work lives,” said Samanthya Marlatt, Director of Youth Empowerment and Advocacy at YSS. “And that might be the first time that our young people have had this opportunity to engage in work where they’re allowed to like, fail and really work through that emerging adulthood piece so they can fail forward.”
Inside the Freight Farms are grow walls and nursery stations that used to grow only romaine lettuce, but have now expanded to radishes, carrots, and even strawberries. Each shipping container is equivalent to around three acres of farm land.
The freight farms give cohort participants a job as they help with the maintenance and harvest of produce each week. They get paid $15 per hour for up to 20 hours per week for each hour spent helping at the farm and in the classroom.
Last summer, participants sold produce that was harvested at the Des Moines Downtown Farmers’ Market. The sold produce went to help fund the Rooftop Gardens, but not all products are sold.
“Knowing that all of our participants receive SNAP benefits, what they can do is take the healthy food that we harvest each week and they can take it home and eat it,” Marlatt said.
The current cohort has five people graduating in December. To learn more about the Rooftop Gardens, click here.