$9,499 raised by 51 donors
95% complete
$10,000 Goal
Sprout City Farms is an urban agriculture nonprofit based in Denver metro, cultivating educational urban farms that engage and strengthen communities.
Wrapping up our 13th season and preparing for our 14th, we celebrate our successes and look at ways to further our impact. Our staff and budget have more than doubled in recent years, which means our capacity to care for community has increased as well. Our growth has made us more reliant on grant funding to do important work such as distributing 55% of our harvest and paying our larger staff (including interns for the first time in 2022!), but we want to sustain our impact by getting back to our roots of community support. Help us nourish our neighborhoods!
Your support helps create healthier, more resilient communities and enables us to:
Sprout City Farms relies on donations to continue our grassroots work. As a small nonprofit with very little overhead, we're a lean operation and you can be sure your dollars directly support our food production, distribution, and education programs, making a difference in the communities in which we work!
Sprout City Farms acknowledges that structural racism has throughout history and continues to create inequities in the food system and in our society. As a white-led organization, we know we have a long way to go. We are working together to figure out our next steps in breaking it down.
Why is now such a good time to donate? We’re growing, in all senses of the word!
Sprout City Farms cultivates educational urban farms to engage communities, strengthen neighborhood resiliency, and root farmers in the city. We envision a thriving local food system supported by a network of accessible city farms which nourish, and are nourished by, their surrounding communities.
Our farms serve as a platform for education, health, food justice advocacy, ecological stewardship, community wealth building, vocational training, and neighborhood resiliency.
Sprout City Farms believes that a thriving local food system is the foundation for healthy, resilient communities. We strive to ensure food-secure communities by developing and strengthening the local food system.
We recognize that Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples are the traditional stewards of the unceded lands we are farming.
Sprout City Farms (SCF) was approached throughout 2009 by a number of community groups interested in urban farming and its potential role in education, food justice and access, economic development, sustainability, community building, and health. While community and school gardens tend to focus more on education and community building, urban farms are unique in their ability to scale up food production and distribution methods to support larger community institutions and whole neighborhoods.
It became apparent that an independent non-profit that could work with many diverse stakeholders was needed to develop a sustainable and replicable model for farming underutilized land across the city. Thus, in response to the growing enthusiasm around farming in public spaces and providing access to healthy food, a group of farmers, researchers, teachers, community members, and business leaders began working together to establish Sprout City Farms in January of 2010.
OUR FARMS
Since 2010, SCF has built four community farms in the Denver-metro area:
- Denver Green School Community Farm, a 1-acre organic vegetable farm started in 2011 in partnership with Denver Public Schools
- Mountair Park Community Farm, a 1.5-acre organic vegetable farm started in 2014 in partnership with the City of Lakewood,
- Dahlia Campus Farm, a 1-acre vegetable farm established in 2016 in partnership with Mental Health Center of Denver (now run by MHCD/WellPower),
- the farm at Jack's Solar Garden, a 5-acre agrivoltaics site that broke ground in April 2021 in Longmont, where we are growing produce under solar panels and working with researchers to study the results. Preliminary findings show that when using agrivoltaics, plants photosynthesize more efficiently, water evaporation is reduced, and solar power is generated more efficiently. We plan to share our findings widely so that more farms can adopt these practices and harvest both crops and the sun as sources of revenue.
Each farm is a platform for community building and learning, hosting thousands of youth and adults throughout the year for programs that connect them to nature, gardening, healthy eating, active living, and each other. Each farm produces over 10,000 pounds of healthy food each year, over 55% of which is distributed at no-cost to families experiencing food insecurity in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding our farms.
Read more about our farms under the "Programs" section below!
Organization name
Sprout City Farms
other names
SCF
2010
Tax id (EIN)
35-2415295
Category
Food, Agriculture & Nutrition, Education, Youth Development, Employment, Environment, Community Improvement & Capacity Building, Human Services
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
PO Box 7536Other
6700 E. Virginia AveOther
5620 W. 14th AveDenver County, CO, US
Jefferson County, CO, US
Boulder County, CO, US