At a time when many small, community-based food projects are facing shrinking public and foundation support, this kind of combined funding and planning assistance is becoming more important than ever.

The 2025–2026 SeedMoney grantees include 660 food garden projects that participated in the 2025 SeedMoney Challenge and are now receiving funding and planning support in 2026.

In 2025, that collective effort showed up in a big way.

2025 Impact at a Glance

In total, 660 unique food-garden projects received SeedMoney support this year through a combination of direct funding and planning assistance.

• 660 total projects supported across 42 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 23 countries
• 333 projects received funding through SeedMoney grants, crowdfunding, or both
• 327 additional projects received Planning Grants only
• 311 projects received both funding and planning support

Together, these projects reflect both national depth and focused international reach, spanning school gardens, community gardens, refugee-led projects, food pantries, urban farms, and grassroots organizations working at the intersection of food, health, education, and resilience.

Why Two Kinds of Support?

SeedMoney’s mission isn’t just about moving money. It’s about helping projects succeed.

• Funding helps groups buy tools, seeds, soil, fencing, irrigation, and other essentials.
• Planning Grants help leaders think ahead — designing better garden layouts, planning crops more effectively, and making the most of limited space and resources.

While funding remains essential, planning support can be a powerful complement for many lower-resourced projects, lowering barriers to participation and helping leaders build capacity over time.

What a Planning Grant Includes

A Planning Grant provides project leaders with more than software. It offers structure, clarity, and confidence throughout the growing season. Planning Grant recipients receive:

• A professional garden design and planning tool, with full access to the Garden Planner and continued updates
• A built-in Garden Journal to track what’s planted, what worked, and what didn’t — season after season
• A Seed Inventory system to take stock of supplies, avoid shortages, and plan purchases more efficiently
• Personalized learning resources through the Garden Guru — videos and articles tailored to each project’s crops and goals
• Priority access to expert support, with experienced gardeners available seven days a week

These tools help project leaders move from good intentions to well-planned, resilient gardens.

With Thanks to Growing Interactive

We are deeply grateful to Growing Interactive Ltd for their extraordinary generosity in making this planning support possible.

In 2025, Growing Interactive donated 628 free subscriptions to their garden-planning platform — a $31,400 in-kind contribution — making it possible for nearly every participating project to access professional-grade planning tools, whether or not they ultimately received funding.

This partnership reflects a shared belief that good planning is foundational to successful gardens, and that access to high-quality tools should not be limited by budget or geography.

Our Funded Grantees (333 Projects)

The table below lists the 333 projects that received funding during the 2025 SeedMoney Challenge.

• Projects marked with an asterisk (*) also received a Planning Grant
• Campaign names link directly to each project’s fundraising page

Planning Grant Recipients (327 Projects)

In addition to funded projects, 327 projects received Planning Grants only. While these groups did not receive funding this year, they are actively building knowledge, skills, and momentum for future growing seasons.

A Growing Community

What matters most to us isn’t just the total dollars raised. It’s the growing community of people who believe that food gardens belong everywhere, and that relatively small amounts of support — offered thoughtfully and equitably — can unlock real, lasting change.

To every project leader who applied, planned, planted, and persisted: thank you. We’re honored to support your work and excited to see what you grow next.

Inspired by these projects? Sign up for SeedMoney News to be the first to hear when the 2026 SeedMoney Challenge opens.

The post 2025-2026 SeedMoney Grantees: 660 Food Garden Projects Supported Worldwide appeared first on SeedMoney.

Work on Your Timing

Choose the right time to send your email. It used to be commonly believed that 6 to 9 AM was the best time to send a fundraising email, but now with people receiving so many morning emails you should consider shooting for early afternoon. There is evidence that that is when people are most generous with their donations. Make sure to experiment, every group is different so try sending some people the email at 6 AM and some at 1 PM and compare the results.

Sharpen Your Hook

Craft an eye-catching subject line, but don’t make it obnoxious. Some organizations choose to include multiple exclamation points, question marks and emojis in their subject lines. Sure that will make you standout, but I would caution against it because that can also make your email look like a promotion or a sale. Many people automatically ignore these types of emails. 

Instead I would encourage you to personalize your subject and ask your audience a short question like, “Can the (name of your garden) community count on you?” or write an aspiration statement, “Help your (name of your garden) community.” These appeals work because they remind the reader that you (the sender of the email) and your audience are part of the same community.

That Personal Touch

Personalization and personification is going to be a common theme in this Grow-How piece because people are more likely to extend kindness to a person than an organization so you need to remind your audience of the people that make up your organization. A good way of personifying your appeal is to send your fundraising emails from one member of your team in particular. So instead of sending your emails from, for example, fundraising@centralhighgarden.org send them from janedoe@centralhighschoolgarden.org. Make sure you also sign off the email from the same person, you could even consider including a signature.

Tell Your Garden Story

People love a good story, how can you make your community garden into a story? Who are the characters? What were the obstacles? How did you overcome them? How can the recipient of this email become a character in that story?Also, I know you could write a whole novel about your garden journey, but no one’s got time for that. Keep it down to a few short paragraphs.

Powerful Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s corny but its true. Choose 1 to 3 high quality images to include with your fundraising email. This ties back into the idea of personifying your organization. Images of people smiling at your audience elicits the types of feelings of care and camaraderie you want from your audience. 

Emphasize(!)

End your email with a call to action and make sure every reader knows its a call to action. It could be as simple as “DONATE NOW!”. You decide how you want to catch your reader’s eye.

Include Links and Contact info in Footer

Now that you’re implementing these techniques people are going to be lining up around the corner to donate and get involved with your community garden. Make sure you have some links and contact info at the bottom of the email so people can easily take that next step.

Optimize for Mobile

Before you press that send button, send the email to yourself and check it on your phone. Make sure the images, layout and sizing of buttons are displaying correctly. 

The post How to Write a Fundraising Email appeared first on SeedMoney.

In this how-to post, we’re offering some general info about garden photography while highlighting effective photos from some of our past grantees. We’ve tried to identify ten of the most common types of photos used by our crowdfunding participants. If you’re responsible for choosing the photos for your garden project’s fundraising efforts, try to include at least three different types.

1. The “Family Portrait”

This shot works well because everyone is in it nice and tight and they’ve made good use of the garden’s layout and structures as a setting. Children are seated and standing on cinder blocks while the adults are standing in the garden path. The photo captures the diversity of the garden in terms of what’s growing and who’s growing it. People are smiling in a natural way, well most people at least! The lighting is perfect with bright, saturated colors and no one having to squint to keep the sun out of their eyes. Lighting is one of the most important things to get right in garden photography. Contrary to what you might think, the best weather for taking garden pictures is an overcast day. 

2. The “Garden in Action” Photo

You should want your viewer to understand what working in a school or community garden looks like, so show them! This photo clearly shows that gardening strengthens relationships. The two girls on the left watering the plants together and the girl on the right extending her arm around her friend—amazing details!

3. The “Close-Up”

Your goal for a close-up should be to create some empathy between your future viewers and your subject. Therefore, you should make sure the face or faces are the focus of the photo. This picture is particularly good because the children are literally enveloped in the garden.

4. The “Fruits of your Labor” Photo

The main difference between food gardens and other types of gardens is the food so you’ve got to show off what you’re growing! Two important things to keep in mind when taking a produce shot are lighting and composition. Make sure your produce is well lit and arranged in some loose order. What really makes this photo stand out is the inclusion of the human element. Hands can tell stories.

5. Make our Mouths Water

We all love eating cherry tomatoes straight from the vine, but there are many other ways to savor the fruits of your labor. If someone in your gardening group is cooking up something finger-licking good with your produce, let the viewers see the finished product being enjoyed by members of the community. This is particularly important for garden projects like homeless shelter gardens or orphanage gardens that are feeding people in need. 

6. The “Wide-Angle” View

Let’s see what you’ve got. Given the size and arrangement of some community gardens it can be difficult to get a shot of the whole thing, but do what you can to show your work in its entirety. This lets your viewer get a better understanding of the scale you are working on.

7. The Birdseye View

Like the “wide-angle” shot, the birdseye view allows a garden to show the full scope of its work but from a unique vantage point.  Aerial photography used to be rare and expensive, but that’s changing fast as drones become more common and affordable. If you have a lot of community involvement in your garden, there’s a good chance that there’s someone who can do this for you or, if not, knows someone who can.

8. The Planting

It’s hard to imagine a more hopeful and symbolic act than the planting of a seed especially when it’s in the hand of a child. A seed is so tiny so it’s easy to underestimate their potential for growth. By capturing this simple act in a photo you help communicate your garden project’s own growth potential which is an important message for a crowdfunding campaign.

9. The Harvest

Harvesting food from your garden is such a satisfying moment. Your supporters would love to be a part of that moment. This photo sticks out to me because of how calm and peaceful the young man looks as he harvests. It’s also an intriguing shot from a horticultural perspective. What variety of beans is he harvesting? How was that overhead trellis set up? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. The “Moment”

A great candid photo captures a moment that won’t ever come around again. Look for a moment. I can’t tell you what that moment will look like, but you’ll know when you see it! To be ready for it, make sure that you have your smartphone or camera with you when you’re working in your garden. 

The post How to Photograph Food Gardens appeared first on SeedMoney.