Quarterly Note from Rebecca Brown, Executive Director
Since I started gardening a decade ago (thanks to Franklinton Farms), I’ve spent the quiet and cold of winter envisioning and planning for the next season… I absolutely adore the sketching, the imagining, the researching. It’s work, but it’s work full of hope!
Just as gardeners and farmers lean into the seasonal rhythm of winter to prepare for the next year’s garden, Franklinton Farms took time to create a good plan.
From late 2021 through the middle of 2022, our entire team—board and staff—diligently gathered, debated, dreamed, and designed a consensus-driven strategic plan for 2022-2025.
This took three retreats, nine working groups, and multiple revision sessions… but now we have an updated mission statement, newly articulated values, and timeline targets and action steps!
Foundationally, the plan grew out of the soil of our new mission statement and values:
The mission of Franklinton Farms is to nourish neighborhood wellbeing and connection through farming, gardening, and education.
Our guiding values are integrity, kindness, and sustainability—all of which orient us toward holistic wellbeing for ourselves and our community.
This plan includes the following broad design, broken down by our program areas:
FARMING: optimize our already productive Urban Farm.
This means our team of farmers will operate efficiently and with skill, proudly offering hyper-local food to central Ohio residents, with special consideration for the preferences of low-income and historic Franklinton neighbors. The farm will be organized, well-weeded, disease-free, host healthy soil, and farm beds will be seeded as soon as they’re available. We will grow our Franklinton customer base and ensure our Weekly Harvest Pack member makeup reflects that of the neighborhood by income and race—serving 86 households in our peak seasons by 2025!
EDUCATION: expand across the entire community
Our Garden Education programming will empower neighbors across ages to better understand gardening, connect with one another, and benefit from the healing of natural spaces. We will operate at some level in all Franklinton schools, develop intergenerational garden opportunities, and improve and expand the Urban Farm Apprenticeship program.
CONNECTIONS: emphasize relational and cross-community touchpoints
As we bring people together and cultivate relationships, we envision neighbors of all backgrounds knowing how to access our fresh vegetables or gardening programs and connecting with each other through our Community Events, Weekly Harvest Pack Programs, the Food Truck, and online. The Lettuce ‘NJoy Food Truck menu will be culturally relevant to food insecure community members and offerings will expose high-income neighbors to the diversity in the community!
BEAUTIFICATION: establish our existing community garden spaces
By 2025 our network of Community Garden spaces including The Avondale Community Garden, Free U Pick Garden, The Patrick Kaufman Learning Garden, dispersed Pollinator Patches, and the South Franklinton Community Garden, will be well-established and easily accessible to all through signage, paths, and seating. Our Farm will become a no-mow operation wherever possible, advancing neighborhood beautification, natural ecology, staff efficiency, and overall production.
VOLUNTEERISM: dependably advance gardening, farming, and education.
Individual volunteers will consistently develop technical skills, while corporate groups will have meaningful experiences and all volunteers will advocate for the Farms in their networks! We want our volunteer base to racially reflect the makeup of the City of Columbus.
CITY-WIDE FOOD SYSTEMS
We strive to be an authentic ally to the movement of food sovereignty and stability in Columbus. To leverage our organization’s privilege and live into this commitment, we are convening the Community Growers’ Network—a pilot program described in more detail here.
These are clearly big plans… with hopes for a meaningful harvest!
To accomplish all of these things, we will work hard, rest enough, and invite the community to sow generously with their time and financial resources.
And while I love winter planning, I deeply admire Spring’s Earthen manifestation hope and resilience!
It is a time announced by raucous birdsong and bright greens—a season where I will step barefoot on the mulch, smell worms playing in my compost, laugh with my children over seed sprouts, listen to the squirrel skitters, watch the diamond water drops collect from the air onto happy plants, and clip or tug my way to my next meal.
In the same way, Franklinton Farms’ Spring of first-buds has arrived: Since the start of this school year, we served 384 individual students in classrooms and another 53 on-site at the Patrick Kaufman Learning Garden; we have a full Weekly Harvest Pack membership (with people on the waiting list!); our community garden benches are going in shortly; and the Lettuce ‘NJoy Food Truck is nearing its final phase before launching.
We also began our senior program in partnership with Dodge Rec Center a month ago and, according to our Education Coordinator Morgan Jack, “Not only did our participants bring some friends… but one of [our] afterschool students was hanging out at the Rec center today and asked if she could join our gardening group… Our little gardener brought a lot of joy to our older gardeners and our first moment of Intergenerational Gardening happened without us even trying!”
We wait and work with hope for what else will emerge from the good soil of a good plan!