About Us

• HISTORY • MISSION • PROGRAMS • FUNDING • TEAM

History

We were founded as a 501c3 in 2003 under the name Kitchen Gardeners International with a focus on home vegetable gardens. Over time, our emphasis gradually shifted from helping home gardeners to offering financial and technical support to a wide variety of public food garden projects. These include community gardens, school gardens, food bank gardens, homeless shelter gardens and senior gardens, to name just a few.

Some of our most notable achievements during our first 10 years included building an online community of 20,000 gardeners from over 100 countries, winning several high-profile online advocacy campaigns to protect front yard vegetable gardens from bureaucratic overreach, giving a popular TEDx talk on the importance of vegetable gardening in our changing times and, most notably, leading the successful online “Eat the View” campaign urging the Obamas to plant a new vegetable garden at the White House.

From 2012-2015, we ran a traditional mini-grants program called Sow It Forward which offered 440 grants. We received over 3000 funding requests from all 50 states and 30 countries during that period. Frustrated at being unable to help more groups, we went back to the drawing board in early 2015 to develop a more innovative and effective funding model that would allow food garden projects to help themselves. At the end of 2015, we piloted the model which involved using challenge grants to leverage donations from individuals. Encouraged by the results of this pilot, we decided to make the funding of public food gardens our focus and renamed ourselves SeedMoney to reflect this new orientation.

Mission

SeedMoney improves the health of people, local communities and the planet by empowering public food gardens and farms to start up and thrive. We work with a variety of local partners including school gardens, community gardens, food bank gardens, community farms, as well as other nonprofits. We offer our partners training in online outreach, access to custom-built user-friendly online crowdfunding technology, cutting-edge garden planning software and grants ranging from $100 to $1000. In doing so, we enable communities and projects in need to become more self-reliant in terms of their food and their funding.

Grant Programs

We offer two types of grants to nonprofit food garden projects:

Challenge Grants: Open to all food garden projects located anywhere in the world, the SeedMoney Challenge is a group crowdfunding campaign that runs each year from November 15 to December 15. Participating projects use our free crowdfunding platform and support services to raise funds from within their community and qualify for challenge grants from us ranging from $100 to $1000. The more a project raises, the larger the grant it qualifies to receive. In addition to our Challenge Grants, we offer a limited number of Geographic Interest Grants (GIG) of $150-$300 without any fundraising requirements. GIG grants are available to garden projects based in Maine or the Global South.

Since 2015, we’ve helped over 2500 garden projects in 50 US states and 68 countries raise the funds they need to accomplish their mission. Here are just a few of our success stories:

Planning Grants: Thanks to the generous support of Growing Interactive, we offer free one-year subscriptions to our innovative and user-friendly online garden planning platform. Worth $50 normally, the SeedMoney Garden Planner makes it easy to draw out your vegetable beds, add plants and move them around to get the perfect layout and a personalized planting calendar for your location.

All of the grants mentioned above can be accessed through the same online application located here: https://donate.seedmoney.org/

Funding

Our work is funded through donations from individuals, family foundations and corporate sponsors.

Team