Donation

Product Description

“I promise to love you unconditionally, to support your dreams, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both shall live…”

Dear Friends:

When Skip and I made this oath on our wedding day 14 years, little did we know this vow would birth Green Gate Farms.

Despite our successful careers in public health, Skip’s dream was to return to farming. So we plunged in, jettisoning our comfortable middle-class lives with two kids under five in tow. This was a terrifying decision. Yet, after years of writing about health, we were inspired to put our knowledge into action.

Fortunately, volunteers arrived in the nick of time. Thanks to many of you a derelict, historic farm site has been revived into a community center that feeds and nurtures neighbors of all incomes. Green Gate Farms provides certified organic vegetables, flowers and meats, through our Community Supported Ag program, Sponsored Shares and farm stand. But there is more to do.

This year our community-based farm took a long awaited step with the creation of New Farm Instititute (NFI), the education arm of Green Gate Farms. This 501©3 formalizes the on-farm education initiatives we’ve done for years (voted “Best place to see food grow” in 2010) and enables us to seek funding to achieve:

• More campers: We’d like 300 adult and child campers to get their hands dirty at camps held during the summer and over breaks, and be inspired in workshops on Beekeeping, Seed-saving, Butchering, Plowing with a Horse, and other farm topics. (Need: funding, especially for scholarships)

• Maintain an open-door policy: Welcome and train up to 5,000 volunteers, teachers, school children and professionals so they leave with an intimate appreciation for local, certified organic food. (Need: tools, wheelbarrows)

• Expand Texas’s First Incubator Farm: We’ve set aside land for aspiring farmers, designed housing with Stanley Studios and are developing a curriculum to pair experienced farmers with those beginning their journey. Central Texas needs more farmers and we’re going to help grow them. (Need: funding.)

• More Partnerships:
· Sponsored Shares program: Continue to support Texas Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Childhood Obesity and UT Charter Elementary School (Need: Donor like Nere Emiko).

· Architects for Humanity has built NFI an Earthbag Building that could easily be Austin’s finest farm toolshed (and prototype for a school in Tibet). Come see!

· Other suggestions?

Remember that giddy feeling you had after a date with “the right one?” That’s how we feel about New Farm Institute. As the local food movement gains momentum, great changes are coming. One day soon, new organic farmers will encompass Austin, fueling a delicious revolution. Now’s the time to join us!

You are encouraged to donate your ideas, your time, your old farming/gardening books for NFI’s lending library, you trash (you never know what we can use), your cash. Whatever you’d like to give to Austin’s newest non-profit is greatly appreciated. To those who have already given this year, thank you for believing in the dream and supporting farm-based education. You rock.

Thank you for the energy, enthusiasm and support that have made our work possible.

Erin Flynn, Executive Director
Skip Connett, President