grants Tag

A partnership between Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Food and Nutrition and REAP Food Group spent much of 2022 bringing local agriculture straight to classrooms thanks to a USDA Farm to School grant. The Harvest of the Month program includes Virtual Farm Tours and a series of video shorts featuring vegetables that students will find right on their lunch trays! In Spring and Fall of 2022, REAP Food Group led virtual farm tours across southern and southwest Wisconsin with help from Shiftology Communications. K-5 classrooms across Madison public schools zoomed into the tours and asked farmers questions live, while REAP polled classrooms to find out how many varieties of apples or mushrooms students could name, or what they thought CSA stood for (= Community Supported Agriculture). Meanwhile, REAP brought on independent video producer Bria Brown, based in Atlanta, GA, to produce engaging short films featuring peppers, greens, corn, and cucumbers. Together Brown, Farm to School Director Allison Pfaff Harris, and Communications Manager Samantha Kincaid visited several local growers and food makers over the summer of 2022 to collect stories and footage. I was repeatedly amazed by all that can be grown in compact spaces and places.Allison Pfaff Harris, REAP Farm to School Director Over the lifetime of the grant, the team got to share the inspired voices of farmers who often spend their days deep in manual labor and managing teams both tiny and large. [O]ne of my takeaways was that farmers are very forthcoming with their knowledge, and want a place to share what they do. These tours provided the opportunity for farmers to share their work and knowledge on a larger platform, without having to leave their farms," said Farm to School Director, Allison Pfaff Harris. All tours and vegetable videos are available for public viewing at the Harvest of the Month page. A Special Thank You to the farmers and chefs who contributed their time and passion to this grant: Alex Booker, Badger Rock Urban Farm and Booker Botanicals Armando Pérez, Pérez Produce Bethanee Wright, Winterfell Acres Elena Terry, Wild Bearies Heidi and Julian Zepeda, Tortilleria Zepeda John & Halee Wepking, Meadowlark Organics Liz Griffith, Door Creek Orchard Patty Grimmer and Ky Christenson, Wonka’s Harvest Sarah Leong, Squashington Farm Tommy Stauffer, Vitruvian Farm Yimmuaj Yang, Groundswell Conservancy Yusuf Bin-Rella, Trade Roots Culinary Collective ...

We are thrilled to announce that Madison Community Foundation (MCF) has awarded REAP Food Group a $50,000 Community Impact Grant to expand our development and fundraising capacity. We will use the funds to hire a grant writer and train our board of directors in fundraising skills in order to grow support for our efforts to build a sustainable and just local food system. COVID-19 laid bare for REAP the unreliability of in-person events as fundraising drivers. Meanwhile, it presented an opportunity to collaboratively problem solve with community partners on the ground. In 2020 we co-created the Farms to Families Fund with Roots4Change to get food into the hands of families who needed it. The impact we saw from that collaboration showed us that we have even more work to do in the community. A focus on strengthening our development capacity in the immediate future will allow REAP to focus our energy into our core goals and on mission-oriented events without relying on restaurant partners to donate time and resources, especially as the food service industry deals with challenges exacerbated by a pandemic. We have big dreams to realize in our efforts to expand Farm to School programming beyond the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), to plan for future disruptions in our local food and farming value chain, and advocate for policies that support sustainable agriculture and a fair food system. “REAP is taking a strategic approach to long-term financial sustainability, recognizing the importance of using not just the development director but also the executive director and board members to build a strong culture of philanthropy[.]...