Week 2:
Matthew 25

February 1, 2013

You know, this winter thing is really throwing off my groove. Matt, my boss, told me last week that since so much of the work I’m doing is computer-based, I didn’t absolutely have to come in to the office every day. “Careful,” I said. “Give me an inch…”

Except I was kidding! I actually LIKE being at the office! You know those studies about people who are more productive when they work from home? Yeah. Not so much. So when illness and undrivable winter weather conditions conspire to keep me home for three days, I get kind of grumpy. For those who are reading this from outside of Northern Iowa, it blizzarded on us a couple nights ago, so things are pretty snowy. And icy. And I am not a happy winter driver, especially when I am driving other people’s cars, which is always.

But, in spite of being campus-bound and having some sort of ominous and questionably contagious illness (that IS NOT allowed to metamorphose into the flu), I am making progress on my fellowship objectives. These are, in no particular order:

– Discuss with Matt the phases of farm/garden development that I won’t be actively living through.
– Create some sort of visual representation of farm/garden development timelines.
– Compile detailed collections of fundraising ideas, one each for the Urban Farm and for school garden programs.
– Write some grants.
– Do some building.
– Explore the Tool Library and farm warehouse (perhaps make a map?).
– Talk to everyone about the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model, and its pros, cons, and alternatives for an urban farm.

This has been the Write Some Grants week. I am slowly working my way up to real-person grant-writing; the first one I did was almost entirely copy-and-paste from last year’s application to the same grant, but the two that I have nearly done from this week required some exercising of ye old powers of persuasive writing. I have discovered that the main skills required for a really good grant-writer are A) superb organization (where did you find that? when is the deadline? can you put it on the spreadsheet? do we even HAVE a spreadsheet?), B) excellent Google-searching skills, C) endless patience for Google searches, and D) storytelling. The last part is the most fun. By trawling through old grant applications and reading the narratives, I’ve been able to piece together the history and mission of Matthew 25 in a way that normally would have required me to appropriate several hours of the co-directors’ time, which, let’s be real, probably never would have happened. I like having this sense of history and retelling the narrative for new grants. It makes me feel like I’m part of the story. It’s a good story.

The other entertaining thing I’ve been doing is putting together a binder of fundraising ideas for the school gardens. This is endlessly amusing, because I get to think about small children running around carnivals, first-graders making homemade salsas from fresh garden produce, and parents outbidding each other for class art projects. Harvest festivals = joy. I think, if I can get it to look all nice and put-together, that I’d like to make it into a PDF so that other school gardens can access it (using design and tech experience from my past life as publicity chair of the Student Theatre Council, natch). As far as I can tell from lots of internet searches, nothing like this yet exists. Hooray for creating new and useful aggregations of knowledge!

Something that was supposed to happen this week and didn’t, due to snow: a meeting at the United Way of East Central Iowa to talk about the second draft of Linn County’s Hunger Free Community Plan. This project (presided over in part by Cornell’s own Brandon Crawford ’12!) looks to identify the scope and causes of hunger in Linn County, who is affected, what we can do about it with existing resources, and where there is potential to expand the current system to help more people. The Urban Farm at Matthew 25 fits neatly into that last one; did you know that the Ellis Street Farm is the first urban farm in Iowa? So, the work we’re doing, to educate people about food and nutrition and provide them with fresh, affordable, organic produce, is addressing a problem that has been largely overlooked. Not that there haven’t been significant nutrition education initiatives, but somehow it’s just not the same as pulling up a purple carrot you planted with your own hands. Anyway, that meeting will happen in a couple weeks, at which point I will have more information (providing it is not, for some reason, top secret).

That’s all for now. I am still having this really significant problem where nothing I do is worth taking pictures of. Maybe I’ll try to take a picture of Matt making fun of me (he’s sneaky; this would be difficult to capture). Or maybe I’ll just take boring pictures and post them. Stay tuned for these exciting developments!