If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Our Story
Discover the heart of 2nd Chance Book Garden, a vibrant community hub where stories bloom alongside plants. Engage in our shared garden, a space where hands cultivate food and hearts nurture connections. At 2nd Chance Book Garden, we believe in the power of storytelling through food, fostering unity and justice. Join us in sowing seeds of change, one story and one harvest at a time. Let's grow together in this garden of second chances.
Join Us to Grow Together
2nd Chance Book Garden is a community collaborative book and garden shop with a sharing garden where community members learn gardening to grow food, sharing and telling food stories for transformative food justice.
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The garden shop markets the houseplants propagated at makerspace and vegetables and herbs harvested from Gardens of Second Chances, community sharing gardens.
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Library with a reading room at the bookshop hosts Museum of Silenced Histories reading circles to convene community members for storytelling and sharing. The stories are archived and exhibited in both on- and offline formats.​​​​​​
Makerspace at 2nd Chance Book Shop is an entrepreneurship incubator. Various programs at makerspace foster and enterprise unique arts and crafts created by community participants, while cultivating individual and collective stewardship for regeneratively healthy, happy, and sustainable living.
​The name “Second Chance” comes from Rhody Grows Hope, a container gardening program by CC4ES. This program uses different types of recyclable materials as planters to grow food, helping with food security and benefiting the environment. The donated books also get a second chance by being used for outreach education that supports food sovereignty. This means communities can have a say in what they eat, which strengthens their cultural identify in choosing what they eat. When we focus on both food security and food sovereignty, we promote food justice, leading to greater environmental, social and economic justice.
2nd Chance Book Garden is an entrepreneurship outlet with a maker space for Rhody Grows Hope products. It incorporates CC4ES' skills training and intern- and apprenticeship programs to platform transformative food justice. It mobilizes building intercultural and intergenerational relationships through communal acts of gardening, storytelling and sharing.
Be the Change Maker!
Donate & Support
Donate houseplants and books, giving them second chances to enterprise at 2nd Chance Book Garden collaborative shops
Host Interns and Apprentices for your business
2nd Chance Book Garden provides skills-training and outreach education for the Y4US Hope Gardeners, and coordinates with community businesses to intern or apprentice sustainability entrepreneurship.
Y4US Hope Gardeners at the Main Oasis, a healthy food store with an eatery on Main Street, Pawtucket
Contact Us
2nd Chance Book Garden is located in the Black Lives Matter-RI | African American Innovation Center **
225 Main Street
Pawtucket, RI, 02860
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Please use the back entrance adjacent to the upper-level parking lot accessible from High Street (one-way street)
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401-680-0840
**African American Innovation Center houses both 2nd Chance Book Garden and the Black Lives Matter-RI along with other social service entities and community organizations at this location. The mission of African American Innovation Center is to establish Black Block Community Cultural District in Downtown Pawtucket.