School Gardens and Community Gardens Dig Deeper into Crowdgranting for Fundraising
SCARBOROUGH, Maine, Aug. 6, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Money doesn't grow on trees or in raised beds which is a shame because it would make fundraising a lot easier for the tens of thousands of school and community gardens across the country that struggle each year to buy tools, seeds and supplies. Thanks to a new online funding model called "crowdgranting," more of these garden projects are able to grow the funds they need to thrive.
Crowdgranting is like crowdfunding except that in addition to raising funds online from individuals, participating projects are able to use the individual donations they receive to qualify for additional funding in the form of challenge grants. The seed of the idea for combining crowdfunding and grants to fund garden projects was first sown in 2015 by a Maine nonprofit called SeedMoney.
"Prior to 2015, we had been offering traditional small grants of $300-$500 to hundreds of garden projects," said Roger Doiron, SeedMoney's founder. "With the rise of crowdfunding, we saw an opportunity to leverage our grant funds in such a way that recipient projects could use them to raise even more money from within their communities."
That crowdgranting seed appears to have landed on fertile ground. Over the past three years, SeedMoney has helped over 1100 garden projects from across the country and around the world to raise nearly $900,000 in funding via its crowdgranting website SeedMoney.org. For many of these garden projects, SeedMoney's crowdgranting platform has enabled them to raise more funds than they could through other fundraising activities and with less effort, thereby allowing them to focus more of their limited human resources on their core mission.
"SeedMoney helped our community garden reach a significant goal in a short period of time with ease," said Jessica O'Neil of Just Roots, a nonprofit that operates a 66-plot community garden in Greenfield, Massachusetts. "The challenge grant offered by SeedMoney engaged our donors who rose to the challenge in good form."
Doiron sees a bountiful future ahead both for the country's food garden movement and for SeedMoney's funding model. The organization will be offering over 250 crowdgrants as part of its next round of funding later this fall, its largest number ever.
"We're looking forward to growing our impacts in the years to come," he says. "Food gardens are part of the solution to so many of society's most pressing problems from social injustice to climate change. Often all that's needed to start up a new school or community garden is a few hundred dollars. In return, such projects are able to produce hundreds of pounds of healthy foods for people in need, not to mention countless opportunities for exercise, social interaction and hands-on learning."
Those societal benefits, Doiron says, are low-hanging fruit for those communities that are willing to put the work in to harvest them.
To learn more about SeedMoney and apply for one of their 250 crowdgrants, see SeedMoney.org
Contact:
Roger Doiron
207-956-0606
[email protected]
SOURCE SeedMoney
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