Dear Friends, this is more like a monthly report as foriegn travel and Covid slowed down our efforts.
In the past four weeks fifteen volunteers worked over 130 hours. Special thanks to Donna, Clarissa, Claudia, Barb, Marion, Dexter, Ken, Amelia, Jim, Marge, Lavorn, Xiong, Htee and Darrell.
Over a 1,000 lbs of produce has been harvested and distributed. Five hundred nineteen lbs has been distributed to Neighborhood House food pantry and to College Court. Over 99 lbs of produce has gone home with volunteers. And I estimate that over 300 lbs was taken by people who come in and pick when no one else is there. This is to be expected and for the most part acceptable. However, it is troubling when people take more than their fair share and pick things before they are not ready. Cabbages have been taken when they were only 25% grown. Same with carrots, onions and peppers. We recently lost a 25 lb pumpkin that was less than 50% grown. These kind of things are demotivating for the volunteers. We are working on signage and cameras to mitigate this somewhat.
We current receive $165 in monthly donations. Our goal is to get to between $300 and $400 per month. $400 per month would support our annual operating expenses. This includes water, port a potty, electricity, land permit, rent, signage, and bagging supplies. A separate part of the budget is for plants and seeds, raised bed maintenance, new construction and improvements. Some of this is covered by Milwaukee’s City Improvement Grant and the matching funds that we seek.
A seperate fund area is for next years launch of our Urban Agriculture Science Academy. This will involve seeking funding to pay students for their time much like the Earn and Learn program. We are currently working on a grant application to fund this endeavor.
This years CIP grant matching fund now stands at $3955. Hence we only have $45 to reach our goal!
Thanks to everyone for your support.
