Marla Rhodes, WFCF Development & Volunteer Coordinator

FOUNDATION AND CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT

Our organization is funded in the following ways: earned income from our CSA and education programs; donations in the form of membership fees, individual/household donations and corporate contributions; some government grants; and grants from private foundations. We raise funding from foundations and corporations for unrestricted support, as well as to offset expenses for our Learning Garden, education programs, and low-income food access programs.

We are on track to meet our foundation and corporate group fundraising goals this year. One fundraising highlight was winning a $100K Cummings Foundation grant for our Produce Prescription/Veggie Rx program. This grant ensures that this program has 4 years of funding in place to serve people who are low income and have medical issues that could be helped with an infusion of fresh food into their diet. We were also very pleased to be one of a handful of groups to receive funding from the Mount Auburn Community Health grant, also to fund Veggie Rx, as well as a larger grant from the Middlesex Savings Bank charitable foundation for our food access work. 

We have held a walk in collaboration with Project Bread’s Walk for Hunger, first Sunday in May, ever since the pandemic began and Project Bread decentralized the event. We had a great group of walkers come out this year. The proceeds we made were half the amount from the year before, largely due to a few longtime walkers not participating this year who happened to disproportionately raise a lot of funds. We are so grateful for their past participation. Please consider joining us in 2023! You can walk, run, or just hang out with the angora rabbits, we won’t tell. 

We are thankful for the support of our Local Business Hero sponsors. A special shout out to our top sponsors Reynders McVeigh Capital Management, Fresh Pond Capital,     Symetra, and Robin Doherty Realtor at KellerWilliams. Please take a look at all of our sponsors for this year and if you frequent their business tell them you notice their support of your favorite nonprofit farm!

VOLUNTEERS

Volunteerism is deeply ingrained into the organization’s very beginnings. We rely on growing all our bountiful produce each year with a mix of year-round professional staff, seasonal field help, and hundreds of volunteers. Volunteers were instrumental in pulling off three of our annual events, all very well attended and smoothly flowing this year: our evening fundraiser Sprout in April, for the first time held at Lyman Estate, went fantastically well. This was followed not long after by two weekends of extraordinarily busy Seedling Sales. Then our annual Farm Day just a few weeks ago, which we are still on Cloud 9 about…these events absolutely would not have gone as well as they did without lots of volunteers, both familiar faces as well as many new community members signing up. This includes groups from Bentley and Brandeis, as well as the Girl Scouts - and all the bakers who made the Farm Day Bake Sale so tasty! Our all-volunteer Board of Directors also helped at these events, and everyone worked to make each event truly shine. 

Helping out in the fields begins in the spring led by our Outreach Farmer Marie-Ana. This included drop-ins on Friday and Saturday mornings, Crop Mobs on special Saturdays - we held 3 this year; and mid-week groups, which are usually corporate employees or university students. They schedule visits from Earth Day in mid-April through the last week of October. Over 600 people, including 32 groups, contributing over 1,600 hours of labor working in the fields and gardens, prepping produce boxes for our Mobile Outreach Market and Veggie Rx program, and staffing our events.

Special shout outs to the volunteers who helped to re-skinn our hoop house, which we kept rescheduling because of wind, but 3rd time lucky! And a big shout-out to volunteers-slash-family members of farm staff who came out one afternoon to build all our new sturdy picnic tables you see on the front lawn! We deepened our relationship with Boston Cares, who sent groups throughout the season. They helped upgrade the Learning Garden area in many ways, including prepping for a new fence and chicken coop, building a dozen benches and storage benches, finishing our raised beds, and doing other work to begin to make the gardens more accessible to people with limited mobility. They also helped prep the property for our annual autumn Farm Day.

For over a decade now we have honored someone with our Volunteer of the Year award. This year we honor two women, one who has been with us for many seasons and another who is new this year.

The first has been a solid presence in farm fields on the weekends for many years, and who contributes each year in other ways as well - Marian Friedman. I believe Marian was volunteer of the year well over 10 years ago! I’m sure many of you know her; this year she also worked at our seedling sales, and each year requests a donation to the farm from her employer - and she doesn’t even work there anymore. 

Our second volunteer of the year is with us tonight. Daisy Grandt came to drop-in volunteers many times over the course of the season, during a year when the weather and weeds were especially fierce. She had never pulled a weed before this year, but we are pretty sure by the end of the season she has become really, really good at weeding. She helped Marie-Ana so often on those Saturday mornings, coming at least a dozen times - grateful appreciations from all the farm staff to Daisy and to Marian for their contributionss.