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Cultivating Community

Overview
Headquarters: 
Portland, ME
Size: 
11-50 employees
Founded: 
2001
Annual Budget : 
$1-5M
Populations Served: 
Immigrants
Low Income
About Us
Mission: 

Cultivating Community grows sustainable communities by expanding access to healthy, local food; empowering children, youth, and adults to play diverse roles in restoring the local, sustainable food systems; and modeling, teaching, and advocating for ecological food production.

Programs: 

In 2020, Cultivating Community will:

- Support 35 farmers, with a combined 850 years of agricultural experience from 7 different countries, through our New American Sustainable Agriculture Project. Provide land access, market support, technical assistance, classroom and in-field training, and connections to other service providers.

- Build synergy between our training program, front-line emergency food services (over 15 pantries, soup kitchens, and food rescue orgs), and food insecure communities through our SNAP and WIC incentive programs; paying New American farmers full price for food that is donated to partner organizations.

- Prioritize low-income gardeners in our urban agriculture programming;  we support 500 gardeners in 12 community gardens in Portland, supporting low-resource and low-literacy gardeners with specialized technical assistance in accessing plots (low-income gardeners jump to the top of a 5-year wait list and CC fundraises to subsidize fees), and provide an additional 88 immigrant gardeners with larger plots, translation, technical assistance, and transportation to our farms outside of the city.

- Reach over 500 primary and secondary students through 5 youth programs, both in and out of the classroom, to build food literacy, leadership development, job readiness, and related skills.

industry: 
Nonprofit