SeedMoney is the new name for what was formerly called Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI), a nonprofit founded in 2003. Over the past three years, our emphasis has gradually shifted from helping home gardeners towards 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.
We’re excited about this new direction but also proud of what we were able to accomplish under the KGI banner. Some of our most notable achievements include building an online community of 40,000 gardeners from 120 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 campaign for a new kitchen garden at the White House.
A New Path
From 2012-2015, KGI ran a traditional mini-grants program called Sow It Forward which offered 440 grants. We received over 3000 funding requests during that period from all 50 states and 30 countries. Frustrated at not being able 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.
As you can see from our impacts, this new approach is showing great promise by allowing us to channel more funds to worthy food garden projects than ever before thereby allowing them to feed and reach more people in need in their communities. While our name is new, we’re still a nonprofit “of, by and for” gardeners and will continue to share helpful and hopeful food gardening through this website, a new e-newsletter we’ll be offering, and our social media channels.
We pride ourselves on earning Guidestar’s highest “Platinum” rating for our commitment to transparency and measurable results. If you’ve been part of our story in the past, we thank you and look forward to staying in touch. If you’re new to SeedMoney, we’re happy you’re here and will be pleased to get to know you and your garden project.
