In the News

Check out this great story about the Free Farm from KQED's Bay Area Bites Blog.

excerpt:

Or, what about starting from the very beginning, and growing more food from scratch right here in the city? Even in cities as highly populated as San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, a surprisingly amount of arable land is still available. Just look at the Free Farm, which was started on a vacant lot at Gough and Eddy Streets in January of this year.

Pastor Megan Rohrer, a young Lutheran pastor who works with a variety of homeless communities around the city as the executive director of Welcome Ministry, wanted to expand the work she was doing, going from feeding the hungry of San Francisco to growing food for those same communities. The St. Paulus Lutheran church was willing to offer an empty lot it owned to her and a dedicated community of volunteers to make a garden.

Meanwhile Tree, a longtime food-justice activist and community gardener as well as the founder of the Mission's popular Free Farmstand, was looking for a place to grow more local food to supply the farmstand. Once Megan's church connections met Tree's gardening expertise, the Free Farm was born. With grants from the Mesa Foundation along with several local Episcopal and Lutheran churches, plus a whole lot of wheelbarrow-pushing volunteer labor, the weedy lot has undergone an astonishing transformation.

What was once a trash-strewn, needle-littered eyesore that neighbors called "The Pit" is now a welcoming, mural-lined space full of neatly mounded raised beds planted with salad mix, potatoes, beans, broccoli and lettuce. Bricks salvaged from the St. Paulus church (which stood on the space before burning down in 1995) now form strawberry beds on the hillside and a winding spiral bed planted with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Cold frames and a newly built greenhouse are filled with trays of tiny seedlings, everything from kale to tomatoes to marigolds started from seeds donated by church communities across the country. Bright garden-themed murals by local artist Leanne C. Miller cover the concrete wall on the west side, and there are plans to bring more artists and sculptors into the garden to create site-specific works.

Volunteers get down and dirty every Wednesday and Saturday from 10am to 2pm, building infrastructure, hauling mulch, manure and compost, planting seedlings, waterings, and more. A volunteer-made vegan lunch, often featuring produce harvested from the garden, is shared by all. Volunteers will also share in the harvest, with excess supplying the Free Farmstand (Rohrer hopes to establish another neighborhood Free Farmstand on the site) as well as providing fresh local produce for twice-weekly homeless dinners organized by Welcome. (For more information on Welcome's additional garden projects around the Bay Area, go to Urban Share.)

Read the whole article and leave comments about the article at: KQED's Bay Area Bites Blog

In the News

Free Farm San Francisco - Tonic

Volunteers turn an overgrown lot in San Francisco into a farm that will provide free food.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country, which makes the idea for the Free Farm all the more remarkable. The 1/3-acre lot located at the corner of Gough and Eddy streets is planning to provide free food to whomever wants it, with much thanks to a man who goes by the name Tree.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Tree, a resident of the city's Mission District, opened what he called the Free Farm Stand in his neighborhood back in 2008, thanks to donations for the supplies he needed and a lot of hard work from various volunteers. Even though Tree said, "I've always got more people in line than food," he's managed to grow and give away more than 6,000 pounds of food.

Tree oversees the volunteers at the plot of land located at Gough and Eddy, land that used to be "an overgrown space for the homeless, junkies and partying gang members." The Rev. Megan Rohrer, executive director of The Welcome Ministry, a San Francisco nonprofit aiming to end poverty, asked the land's owner, the Lutheran Church, if Welcome could grown food on the lot, and the church agreed, unofficially giving them three to five years. Following a three-month cleanup, seedlings are now being planted and while it could be months until workers start to give out food, it's going to happen.

Not only will it help those in need, but as Tree explained in the article, it also helps the community at large. "Doing things for free encourages people to share. It encourages people to be community, to be family. It provides people the chance to be generous with each other." Let's hope the generosity continues to spread.

See the original: Free Farm San Francisco

Urban Gardening Project in Full Swing

learn more about the gardens at: urbanshare.blogspot.org

Free Farm
The Free Farm is located in the vacant lot that used to be St. Paulus Lutheran Church (Eddy & Gough in San Francisco), before it burned down in 1995. We’ve partnered with No Penny Opera, Produce For the People, Stanford’s Gleaning Project, the Diocese of California to transform the site into a space for community arts, health education and of course free food for the neighborhood. Currently we’ve completed a mural, built a ramp, steps, a shed and planted strawberries, artichokes and irises. In process is a garden mound labyrinth, a green house and large beds for growing bulk produce. It is estimated that the site will grow 12,000 pounds of produce each year that we will give away for free!

Work days are (vegan lunch provided):
Saturdays 10am-2pm;
Wednesdays 11am-2pm

Little Farm of Bethlehem
At our farm at Bethlehem Lutheran in West Oakland, we are working with the good folk at Urban Farming and the corporate sponsorship of Kraft will provide the topsoil, seedlings and the tools needed to launch the project. A ground breaking celebration will take place on March 20th from 10am-2pm. In addition to the beds created with Urban Farming, we will also be creating a labyrinth garden and working on a mural to spruce up the area around the garden.

Other Garden News
At Christ Church Lutheran (19th and Quintara in San Francisco) we’re filling open tree wells with wild flowers and replacing the bushes with drought resistant plants that help preserve water and create habitats for local birds, bees and butterflies.

The St. Mark’s Lutheran garden ground clearing is complete. This garden will be serve not only the members of St. Mark’s, but also the seniors living at Martin Lutheran Towers.

At Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran in Berkeley will be creating a biblical garden that the congregation will use for Lent, their Bible School and may even allow some local Girl Scouts to get organic gardening badges!

Thanks to our Major Garden Supports
Bill Graham Memorial Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.
ELCA Domestic Hunger Program
Episcopal Charities
Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, MN
The Sam Mazza Foundation
St. Francis Endowment of St. Francis Lutheran Church

Doing More with Less

Throughout this blog, you have probably noticed that Welcome is doing more to directly support those living in poverty and to educate communities about homelessness and poverty than we have ever done before.

We not only have more programs, but we are also serving more people than ever before due to the economic downturn and closure of many other local organizations. At the same time, foundations that we were once able to count on for regular operational support have shifted their focus or stopped giving out money all together. While giving from individuals exceeded our budget in every area, we still had to tap into our rainy day fund in order to make it through 2009.

Thankfully, frugal spending and smart saving in past years was able to help us weather this difficult new economy. This year, Welcome faces the unique challenge of not only raising our general operating expenses, but also replenishing our rainy day funds.

Other organizations like to show that only a small percentage of their budget goes to staff salaries, Welcome works so closely with the community that we are able to get in-kind donations for nearly all of the food, toiletries, garden supplies and other material items that we share with those living in poverty. As a result, almost our entire budget is the salaries of our Executive Director, Director of Independent Living, Intern and Volunteer Corp member.

While the overwhelming majority of our donations come in during November and December (around Thanksgiving and Christmas), the salaries of the Welcome staff are paid evenly throughout the whole year. This year, because we do not have a surplus from 2009, we are currently forced to do more with less than ever before.

Today I ask you not to wait until November or December, and if you can to give your full annual donation now. Your gift today will support the staff of Welcome and help us spend less time fundraising and more time directly work with our guests.

Rev. Megan Rohrer

Community Garden Workday

We will beginning regular work days at the St. Paulus community garden (Eddy and Gough) every Saturday from 10 am -2 pm starting January 2nd. Volunteers are encouraged to bring a sack lunch and wear long pants and close toed shoes. Volunteers of all ages are welcome and will be required to sign a waiver before they work in the garden. Bring gardening gloves if you have them.

There will be tasks that range from physically demanding to light.

Work days will be canceled if it rains.

If you would like more information about volunteering please contact: pete@welcomeministry.org

If you would like to be notified by email of future workdays please sign up for our newsletters using the box in the upper right hand corner of this blog.

Community Gardening Project

We're working on community gardens as a way to provide food for low income individuals. Below is something we are going to try to use to create some roof top gardens.

Urban Food Share: Community Gardening Project

Just a hint of some of the work we're doing to help people recover from the recession. Our new partner in this project is Produce to the People.