Frogtown Farm
Report date
August 2016
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Developing our organizational capacity and infrastructure while simultaneously completing construction on the farm site has helped turn our vision into reality. Over the past year we have added 5 staff and partnered with other organizations to increase our capacity. We have developed our organizational systems, policies, procedures and tools while also working on professional development and learning to work as a team. While this foundational work continues, it has been integral to the community engagement we have seen over the past year.
We have worked tirelessly to test community programming, events, workshops, gatherings, partnerships and more. We have learned that we do not always have to have the answers and the knowledge and often we do not. If we hold the space (physically and figuratively), ideas and inspiration come from our wider community. This can be a messy and time-consuming process but has lead us in places we did not always anticipate and in the end we hope will create more useful and engaging solutions, programs and activities.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
I think to be successful in community-based development work we need to be all three, but each individual and organization may have their own definition of what inclusivity, collaboration and resourcefulness look like. We are still working on defining our processes to reflect our values, but most important across the process are our values of racial equity and social justice.