Jack Goodwin | Top 40 Under 40 2025

Age: 38

Occupation: Co-Founder, Vacant Lots Farm Club

Jack Goodwin remembers planting hundreds of trees with his classmates in Bowmont Park (part of which is now Dale Hodges Park) during an elementary school project.

A year later, all of those trees were dead.

“I remember thinking, ‘I really thought that we would understand how to plant trees by now,’” says Goodwin.

That moment sent Goodwin on a journey. After completing a degree in chemistry at the University of Calgary in 2009, he discovered the worlds of urban agriculture and permaculture, which is the development of self-sustaining agricultural ecosystems.

“Growing up in Calgary, [I understood] how much space we have. There were a lot of people doing backyard urban farming at the time, but I looked around and I didn’t see anything bigger,” says Goodwin.

In 2013, Goodwin met the founder of Grow Calgary, and they collaborated on developing a nine-acre plot of land into an urban farm for the Calgary Food Bank.

Since then, Goodwin has helped found Land of Dreams, a farm focused on providing services for refugees and newcomers, and worked on the City of Calgary’s first outdoor urban agriculture pilot, Highfield Regenerative Farm, to create and refine bylaws surrounding urban agriculture.

To date, he has helped create more than 50 acres of farmable land within city limits.

His latest venture, Vacant Lots Farm Club, is a non-profit turning underutilized land into community farms. Members grow and harvest fruits, vegetables and flowers. Everything produced is shared among the members, as well as with local food charities.

The club was recently awarded a vacant five-acre piece of land (a future school site in Country Hills Village), marking the first time that a Calgary school board opened one of these sites for community activation. Goodwin plans to use this farm for therapeutic horticulture — healing the body, either physically or mentally, through working with the land and soil.

“There’s no better feeling than making people feel comfortable through food and through growing that community,” says Goodwin.

Thank yous
“My partner Diane Cassidy; my parents Duncan and Lis Goodwin; my brother Sam Goodwin; my good friends Vicky Lee, Angela Stinson, Jason Reule, Urvil Thakor and Rob Wickerson.”