Community Agriculture Project
About
Emily Davis is a scientist, researcher and community advocate. They hold a Master's degree in Environmental Science focusing in soil science and regenerative agriculture. They started Community Agriculture Project in 2020 documenting major ag hubs across the country. In addition to the project, they currently work on soil remediation, community grant writing, community education and community organizing.
The Community Agriculture Project is an accessible and interactive agriculture resource directory. We document and provide insight into local agriculture landscapes and sovereignty-based projects. Our deliverables include a podcast and an online resource forum.
Community Agriculture Project brings exposure to the people hard at work regenerating land and strengthening the food system. The project pushes for a stronger network of support for these initiatives.
The main values of the project are to embrace food sovereignty, support the makers and growers in local communities, support the regeneration of land, encourage resource optimization, and encourage education through experiential learning and skill sharing.
By supporting this project, you are funding stronger community and decentralized food systems that can help to repair our relations with each other and the Earth.
Details
Anyone can go to communityagproject.com to access the current resource directory. It is organized by educational opportunities, workshops and events, CA (community supported agriculture), farmer's markets, volunteering, and general postings.
You can become a member for free to be able to contribute to this forum. This means you can post about any resource from your network that aligns with CAP's forum.
Other ways to engage with this project is by listening to our podcast, which can be found on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Music and more. Our podcast is truly a web of stories from people doing work in or related to food systems across the country. Any listener is bound to relate to a story that they hear and feel called to connect with their community in a new or deeper way.
Rewards
Supporters of our project can expect to receive a shoutout to them, their work or their business on our podcast. Larger supporters can become official sponsors of the Community Agriculture Project. All supporters will receive a unique artwork that represents part of the larger web of our project, and simply the guarantee that they are contributing to work that is shifting the landscape of our food system.
The future
Throughout the year, CAP will host 2 organized, in person events for community engagement. These will be volunteer days at local community gardens. One will be hosted in Florida in January 2024, and one in New York City during late summer 2024. If we can have more, we hope to do so!
In January and February of 2024, The Community Agriculture Project will be traveling back to Puerto Rico to continue supporting regenerative agriculture projects.
In 2024, we will put out another season of our podcast, with topics ranging from the solidarity economy and cooperative models to exposing systems that were meant to work for local food systems that did not. Episodes will be put out throughout the year, monthly, with a goal of 10 episodes by the end of the year.
We hope to take all of the data of opportunities and postings from our forum and create a visual map for visitors of the CAP website. This interactive, visual model will make the forum even more accessible. This is a goal the last quarter of 2024.
Whenever possible, we will feature upcoming grant opportunities for the community on our instagram page, and continue to feature farms and projects outside of what we feature in the podcast on our page (@communityagproject)
Funds will be used to support the outsourcing of the interactive map creation for the CAP website, logistics, planning and execution of the podcast, and the organization of in-person events. Funds support our website and domain fees, and software fees associated with the podcast. Otherwise, funds support the project creator and the communities they work in.
CAP has continuously met its small and large scale goals for the past 3 years. Contributors can be assured that their donations will fund continued documentation work.
Risks & challenges
The Community Agriculture Project has been going since 2020. This project is considered an open-ended research experiment.
Here have been our biggest obstacles:
1. funding support for the the creator's time and fees associated with the website and podcast
2. more widespread engagement in forum has been engagement in our forum
We can overcome these challenges by continuing to market the project to a larger and larger audience. As this happens, we find out about more opportunities to fund CAP, like the Artizen Fund and Juicebox! Additionally, marketing for our project to different people and communities can help to spread the word about our forum, and get feedback on the current state of the forum and how it can improve.
Call to action
If you want to be a part of a cultural shift back to community-grounded food systems, please consider supporting CAP.
Get the word out to your friends, family and community!
Any support, big or small, makes such a difference.