I live in a city, but I'll share some programs that/organizers who may provide some inspiration:

BMORE Beautiful - provides trash picking kits and helps residents organize cleanups in their neighborhood. They were incredibly friendly, so might be worth reaching out on how to build a similar program in your area

Weed Warriors - trains participants to recognize and remove common invasive plants, provides training for participants on how to organize efforts in their communities

Community gardening - this video is from an animal liberation podcast, but the guest's opening story of being completely ignorant about gardening but doing it anyway is inspiring. The remainder is about their work on food justice and grassroots organizing

Compost collective - this is the podcast of the guest in the previous video. They interview the founder of Baltimore Compost Collective who works with youth in the city

Guerrilla gardening - this is a classic TED Talk. The speaker discusses growing food in a public space and how they successfully fought their city to keep their garden. They also talk about their volunteer gardening group, planting food gardens at homeless shelters

Maryland Food & Abolition Project - may no longer be active, but an interesting idea nonetheless. Their mission was (is?) to partner community gardens with prisons to provide fresh produce

Echoing @poVoq, don't discount seniors! I used to be a case manager for the elderly and many are more interested than people give them credit for.

Did you know they're edible? I found out from this video last week, but it seems like a lot of work.

Awesome resource :) I've been looking into soft landings too! Nearby me, there's a corp owned commercial lot that's been vacant for years, bare-bones maintenance. The street trees out front are Callery pear, which I can't do anything about, but the ground under them isn't tended.

There's also two very sad trees in the middle of the parking lot and one empty tree well (which recently inspired me to rewatch this video lol).

Somewhat Verbally Abusive "Kill Your Lawn" Instructional Video Nice

I grew up on concrete with streets peppered by exotic callery pear and feral pigeons. It wasn't until a friend moved to a neighborhood with big yards (for the city, anyway) that I saw cardinals, bluejays, cottontails, foxes, and nights lit up by fireflies.

I live close to that neighborhood now and the streets here are lined with willow oak, black cherry, and sycamore. So many woodland creatures and cool bugs, some of which are recorded on iNat.

But go a mile south to a redlined neighborhood and the canopy is sparse to none. The streets are lined with empty tree wells, usually sloppily paved over. Some years ago, the police installed bright white spotlights and surveillance cameras. Absolutely brutal stuff.

If nobody got me, I know Chesapeake Bay Watershed got me 🙏 Can I get an amen?

Baltimore City has an adopt-a-lot program, allowing residents to use vacant lots for urban agriculture or community projects. However, as stated in point 3, it can be difficult to keep them going long term:

One farmer, Rich Kolm, said urban farms in Baltimore are playing several critical roles: They are community centers, educational hubs and fresh food producers in food-insecure neighborhoods.

Kolm has overseen three separate farms on adopted land in the city, and now he works as a contractor to those attempting to do the same. Though he commended the city’s low-cost water access service that accompanies lot adoption, he said people may not want to start a farm under the program if the land could be taken away.

“The whole idea of agriculture is that you’re building something,” said Kolm. “The only way to do it well is to make it permanent. But the city’s attitude is that urban agriculture might be a means of raising property values so much so that the agriculture gets kicked off the site.”

Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:

“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”

“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”

The above map doesn't include fishing, it's showing land use. This shows fishing:

Here is another one about land animals:

Interactive map

Honey bees were domesticated, selectively bred like all other livestock, to be more docile and dependent. The relationship you describe was created by humans for the benefit of humans.