Carly Sugar is a food grower, educator and advocate. Her destiny in this work was seeded by her ancestors’ growing medicinal herbs in rural Hungary and raising chickens upon immigrating to the U.S.
Her parents, who met in a cooking class, instilled in her an appreciation for quality ingredients and stressed the liberation that comes with preparing food.
In her role as Giving Gardens director at Yad Ezra, Carly’s work sits in the intersection of food production, Jewish culture and history, and food issues. At Giving Gardens, volunteers harvest regeneratively grown produce for food pantry clients, and program participants examine the societal structures that perpetuate unequal access to healthy food.
Carly currently lives in Detroit’s North Corktown neighborhood, where she keeps a garden, bees and chickens, and makes a point of regularly playing with her food. Her experiences in Detroit’s urban farming landscape have complexified her understanding of food, solidifying it as a vehicle to explore spirituality, heritage, and the most important social and environmental issues of our time.