Frogtown Farm CI Report – Interim

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.

Collaborating with other organizations and experimenting with partnerships has helped us learn what will work and what might not work well going forward. Convening these groups has also helped us explore other partnership ideas and seek other funding opportunities jointly. In our community of Frogtown, politics at the organizational level can be complicated to maneuver. We continue to learn as an organization how best to move forward and how we will raise up our community in collaboration.

Key lessons learned

While we have significantly expanded our staff and partnerships, capacity continues to be our biggest challenge. We have quickly become a go-to organization in the community for any emerging issues or opportunities – balancing our desire to support community iniatives while also staying focused on our mission has been a challenge. We are learning that we can’t do everything and that we must have a well-run farm and production from the farm in order to create the broader impact we hope to have.

One of the most important lessons we have learned is about partnering to increase our impact. We had initially planned to hire a team of community ambassadors to Frogtown Farm to continue our community outreach. When funding was cut for a neighborhood youth group, we instead decided to partner with the organization running that group to bring the program back as a Frogtown Farm outreach – our ‘Frogtown Farm Crew.’ Our partner organization (Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center) brings youth development and evaluation expertise, while we provide the food justice, community organizing and farming expertise. Had we tried to go it alone in the Community Ambassador program I think we would have had more limited results and taken longer to ramp up the outreach.

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.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Understanding the problem

We have learned a lot about collaboration and partnership through our work so far. We have heard from partner organizations that a traditional ‘collective impact plan’ may not be the best method for identifying shared goals and creating an action plan. We are collectively working on a neighborhood food plan that will address the issues we first outlined in our grant application – barriers to healthy eating, intercultural and intergenerational connectedness etc. The need has also increased dramatically. In the last 6 months two 25+ year programs have closed in the neighborhood – the Sharing Korner Food Shelf and the Loaves & Fishes meal program. We are taking a leadership role in addressing how to service the gap in food availability in the short-term and long-term. We are working with partners to figure out a new model for meeting basic food needs that empowers people and is rooted in racial equity and social justice.

If you could do it all over again…

I think the process has been important to where we are now. While there are activities, partnerships and basic models that we learned are not going to work for us, it was important to test and iterate on those ideas.