In the beginning there were 33-acres, a few goats, a farmer, and a city full of kids who needed better food. And with little more to rely on than the energy of students and support of volunteers and community advocates, food began to grow.
Since 2008, Great Kids Farm has been working to address one of the nation’s most pressing issues: the lack of access to nutritious food among our youth, and the resulting gaps in knowledge and skill required to select, prepare, and eat healthy foods. Converting a dormant property owned by the school system into a working educational farm seemed at once like a radical idea and the most obvious place to start. But like so many urban school districts, Baltimore City Schools had few resources to devote to this effort.
But through the dogged work of the Farm staff, creative leadership from the school district, and a broad base of community support, the Farm has flourished, hosting up to 3,800 students annually for experiential learning visits, and sending over 2,000 pounds of fresh produce to school cafeterias per year. City Schools now supports four full-time staff, complemented by service corps positions funded by Friends.
Friends of Great Kids Farm was founded in 2011 to organize and mobilize the community’s interest in supporting this work. In the beginning, we used our flexibility as a small nonprofit to help in any way we could, making it easier for the staff to implement innovative ideas and procure the resources they needed to serve more students.
But as our support for the Farm’s programs grew—we’ve raised over half a million dollars to date—so too did the need to create an integrated approach to planning the Farm’s programs. With so many stakeholders invested in the Farm, including large foundations, small businesses, corporate entities, and individual donors large and small, we needed a roadmap to ensure that our investments, and the investments of the school system, were contributing to clear goals shared among City Schools and Friends.
In winter 2015, with generous support from Goldseker Foundation, Abell Foundation, and City Schools, the Farm undertook its first-ever comprehensive strategic and operational planning initiative. The Farm staff, City Schools leadership, Friends board and staff, volunteers, and stakeholders came together for an intensive two-day session to map the Farm’s progress to date, assess successes and challenges, analyze reach of programs and identify gaps, and create a plan to ensure all students have access to the Farm’s unique programs, fostering academic achievement, personal wellness, and career readiness.
A key part of this process was identifying the distinct competencies of City Schools and Friends in order to structure a more productive partnership. For example, City Schools can leverage it’s enormous human resource capacity to hire, pay, insure, and manage staff much more easily than a small nonprofit, while Friends can use it’s status as an independent organization to purchase the unique materials required for farm-based education, without the hurdles of institutional procurement.
The plan that emerged spans the educational spectrum, providing programs and resources to support the proliferation and success of schoolyard gardens, on-campus programs with the potential to serve every student in the district, and intensive career-training programs for students progressing from high school toward careers. Click here for an infographic summarizing the plan.
It’s an ambitious scope of work, but we felt confident that it would be embraced by the school district as well as Friends’ supporters. An operational plan was created to articulate how the goals of the plan would be achieved, including a request for additional staff through the school district, and an expectation of increased fundraising for program materials and infrastructure through Friends.
However, soon after the plan was completed, City Schools found itself in the position of having to reconcile a multi-million dollar budget deficit, and making tough but necessary decisions to cut hundreds of staff positions. It became clear that additional staff for the Farm would not become a reality at a time when people were losing their jobs.
However, City Schools and Friends remain committed to the ideals of the plan. One of the strengths of a small nonprofit is the ability to mobilize our supporters when the times get tough. In June 2015 we launched a fundraising campaign to help provide the resources needed to turn plans into reality: funds to expand staff capacity through additional service corps positions, to provide bus transportation for students visiting the Farm, and to help renovate our historic greenhouses—key infrastructure for production and programming—for consistent operations and energy efficiency. Our goal is to raise $40,000 by October 2015. As of mid-July, we’ve raised just over $3,000.
Friends of Great Kids Farm will always need the support of our donors, volunteers, and advocates to provide consistent support for the Farm. But at this moment, we need you more than ever to keep progress moving forward, and help the Farm remain a bright spot in the education of City Schools students. We’ve worked with partner businesses to line up some fun and delicious ways to contribute, but the most direct way you can support us is with a donation.
It’s not often that I am quite so direct in asking for financial contributions. But stepping back from our intentions to grow support for students, at this moment in our City’s history, when it’s become painfully obvious that so many young people need access to opportunity, is not an option. So I’m asking you not to wait until year’s end—the new school year is approaching and it’s up to us to help the Farm hit the ground running, confident that they have the resources to make good on our promises to our students.
