At a glance
As of September 2021, the UW Farm team launched the Strategic Plan Initiative. This project is all about creating room for the… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2020-2021
- Large
- Awarded
- $52,245
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
As of September 2021, the UW Farm team launched the Strategic Plan Initiative. This project is all about creating room for the UW Farm team - which includes students, staff, faculty, campus organizations, and community members - to collectively reimagine the structure and purpose of the UW Farm as to be more financially sustainable. As a campus and community organization, the UW Farm has provided innumerable opportunities for people to learn about and practice urban farming. The UW Farm is also a key food provider for UW Housing & Food Services, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shareholders, and the UW Food Pantry. This latter partnership helped the UW Farm further step into the role of addressing food insecurity and community resilience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the UW Farm holds a valued partnership with wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ through the Native Garden and the future Cultural Kitchen. In moving forward with developing a 5-year Strategic Plan, we aim to strengthen community partnerships and create the financial infrastructure to support diverse, unique, and inclusive opportunities for our campus community. The Campus Sustainability Fund is supporting this project through funding a year-long graduate student Research Assistant - Madison Rose Bristol - to spearhead this work. Some of this funding also assists the UW Farm Manager - Perry Acworth - in restructuring UW Farm activities. Though this work will take place between September 2021 - June 2022, our hope is to begin implementing the 5-year plan in the Spring of 2022, and to lay the foundation for the development of another Strategic Plan in 2027.
During the last two years, the UW Farm has cultivated a dramatic increase in student use and interest, a doubling of food production and land area, new organic and Salmon-Safe certifications, a new food security role on campus in partnership with the UW Food Pantry, a growing food sovereignty partnership with wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House, and expanded demands for research collaborations. The University Sustainability Action Plan identifies food sustainability as a priority for our campus. In that plan, there is strong support for university facilities to purchase directly from the UW Farm and for the farm to grow as a living laboratory for campus. Concurrently, UW Farm funding has stagnated in part because of rising student labor costs and pandemic-related decreases in Housing and Food Services (HFS) purchasing and UW Grounds support. It is critical that the UW Farm develop a strategic action plan to address the challenges in meeting present and future demands for academic programming.
The UW Farm Advisory Committee has been working closely with the Farm Manager to identify areas in need of staffing and mechanisms for funding and fundraising. This is a crucial moment of farm growth. We urgently need support to collaborate in developing a strategic action plan for the farm for the next ten years. This process includes identifying areas of need and options for staffing to fill those needs, identifying and creating pathways for additional revenue, and working with UW Advancement to identify outside funding sources for the UW Farm. With this support, the farm can continue to respond to growing student demand, center outreach to diverse student populations, and be a shining example of sustainability at UW.
This strategic, short-term position - the UW Farm Interim Development Coordinator - is available for a graduate student to learn with the farm leadership as we research and build a coalition across the university. Specifically, this graduate student role - designated as a Research Assistant (RA) - will work with the UW Farm Manager to help identify needs, assist in organizational tasks, analyze student involvement data, prepare materials for strategic planning meetings, develop graphics for presentations with potential campus partners, and work with farm staff to ease some of the administrative burdens of running a campus farm. Currently, there is only one permanent staff member, so gaining the support of an RA would make a substantial difference. Additionally, this role will support the farm through an important capacity-building moment, with increased need for food security, food sovereignty, and food systems programming through the pandemic and beyond. The outcome of this work includes a strategic action plan for a more sustainable program better scaled to the farm’s funding model and student demand. The proposal requests $45,045 to support this RA position and $7,200 to support the farm manager’s time collaborating in this work, totalling this grant request to $52,245. We believe this position is vital for helping the farm move forward with a long-term strategic action plan for growth in both production and education for our campus.
This proposal is designed to help the UW Farm develop the strategic capacity of the farm to manage growth in its operations. The RA will be housed in the Environmental Studies department and will report to Dr. Eli Wheat (Program on the Environment & Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health & Co-Chair - Farm Advisory Committee). However, the student in this position will also work closely with Perry Acworth (UW Farm Manager) and Dr. Yona Sipos (Core Faculty - Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health & Co-Chair - Farm Advisory Committee). This position is essential to the sustainable functioning of the UW Farm, as the RA will further develop and support the potential for transdisciplinary academics and help grow ongoing programmatic relationships centered in access, inclusion, and equity, as exemplified by our relationships with wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House and the UW Food Pantry.
Madison Bristol
Project lead
- mbrist96@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
Eli Wheat
Team member
- elizaw@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Faculty
Overview
This strategic, short-term position - the UW Farm Interim Education Coordinator - is available for a Graduate Student to learn, build capacity for, and advance the community-building, academic support, and food sustainability capacity of the UW Farm on the University of Washington campus.
The purpose of applying for CSF Funding is to expand the capacity for the UW Farm to support existing educational programs and to research potential partners to aid in the expansion of the UW Farm offerings, both academic and production. The UW Farm is creating this interim position for three years to support the continued development of UW Farm programs and reach more populations that are not included currently.
This 3-year proposal is designed to help the UW Farm develop the strategic capacity to permanently fund an Education Coordinator. This position is essential to the sustainable functioning of the UW Farm as to further support multidisciplinary academic, production, and community outreach programs which center inclusion and equity.
UW Farm background
The UW Farm works to create and sustain farming activities on the UW Seattle campus by prioritizing the following goals:
- Providing students with practical urban farming experience, from planning to production to the table.
- Creating a model of sustainable and resilient urban food production at the UW.
- Providing reliable, predictable, certified organic, and quality food-safety certified produce for sales, including but not limited to the UW Farm Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and UW Housing & Food Services (HFS).
- Providing produce free of charge for other uses such as the Humblefeast, UW Food Pantry, student gleaning teams, UW Farm events, and fundraisers.
- Facilitating the growing of traditional foods and preserving of farming practices in cooperation with wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ, the UW Intellectual House under the Office of Minority Affairs, including the Native Garden Plot at the Center for Urban Horticulture.
- Linking the practice of urban farming directly to interdisciplinary academic programs in the study of food, including but not limited to coursework, independent research, capstone and culminating experiences, and other experiential-learning opportunities.
- Being a positive neighbor to the immediate community by engaging with visitors and offering volunteer programs to both UW and non-UW individuals.
Sustainable impact
Currently the UW Farm prioritizes building an inclusive program - all students regardless of discipline are welcome at the student farm to learn and volunteer. As a consequence, students from all over campus participate in the farm! With the growth of academic programs which highlight food production, equity, sustainability, and population health across our campus, there has been a surge in student activity at the UW Farm. In addition to classes utilizing the farm directly, students are approaching the farm for independent study opportunities, and outreach activities through RSO’s like UW Farm, Dirty Dozen, ASUW Food COOP, Green Greeks, and Eco-Reps. Through these formal and nonformal pathways, the Farm provides a living laboratory for the campus community to learn, experiment with, and advance transdisciplinary sustainability.
In an average year, the farm hosts over 2000 individuals. These are students primarily, but also faculty, and even alumni and neighbors who share community pizza bakes utilizing farm fresh produce, attend workshops with no fees, and learn how to grow food sustainably through hands-on education at the farm.
With the continued growth of UW Farm programming, members of the farm staff and the Farm Advisory Committee - composed of faculty, staff, and students - have identified the need to hire another staff member. This person will help integrate and coordinate educational activities across the farm, allowing students, staff, and faculty to get the most out of our campus farm and the learning opportunities it offers. In this, the proposed position will support the environmental sustainability of the farm as a system. At this moment, the UW Farm and its single permanent staff member are overtaxed trying to meet production goals, partnership commitments, community outreach events, integration with existing UW course partnerships, and the steep increase in student interest and involvement. This position will allow farm staff the time they need to continue to develop and strengthen the regenerative farm practices that help make the UW Farm a shining example of sustainability on our campus.
Funding an Interim Education Coordinator at the UW Farm would bolster social sustainability by improving environmental learning, coalition building, and communication capacity across the university. The position would focus on inviting units across the university who might not be aware of the UW Farm and for whom the farm could provide services. Units that could be engaged would be: College of Built Environments, Arts and Sciences, Office of Minority Affairs, and others.
We envision that this position will help build a strong base of support across the university for the creation of deeper educational and curricular integration at the farm. In the pursuit of this, we will use this position to engage with multiple academic units and RSO’s to create a strong, interdisciplinary collaboration with new partners. These new partners will help us build a coalition of supporters deepening both our resources and our potential to develop new partnerships.
The UW Farm was certified organic and Salmon-Safe certified in 2020 and also practices regenerative agriculture practices. With the additional support of this graduate student position, these urban farming practices and food production methods will reach more students and engage more faculty in the possibilities of using the UW Farm as a practical demonstration of environmental sustainability. As a consequence, we envision that our work in food waste recycling, biodiversity enhancement, organic food production, environmental justice, and equity will be increased in visibility and impact.
Leadership & student involvement
One graduate student will be hired part-time 10-20 hours per week. This student will report to the UW Farm Manager. This student will write the CSF quarterly reports for the UW Farm CSF grant and help mentor student interns, student staff, and RSO’s. The Education Coordinator may also lead field trips, be a guest speaker for courses and other entities, and work with faculty to coordinate labs on the farm. It is essential that the student understand the educational programming of the UW Farm. However, the primary job of the student in this role will be to help strategize and support the creation of a coalition of departments willing to help create a longer term position to integrate academics more strongly into the UW Farm program.
Education, outreach, & behavior change
In our vision, this position will help support educational efforts at the UW Farm with the goal of creating a deeper and more comprehensive plan for education and meaningful student involvement in this unique campus resource. As we see it, this position will allow the farm some additional spaciousness from which to approach its educational mission. The position will allow the farm to move from a reactive space - responding to need - to a proactive relationship with students, faculty and community members. In this proactive space, the farm will be well-positioned to sustainably extend learning opportunities with deeper mentoring for students and tighter long-term relationships with faculty and departments across campus.
Feasibility & accountability
A key deliverable will be that each quarter the Interim Education Coordinator will write a written report to the Farm Advisory Committee, Deans, and Directors. This report will outline the progress made in the pursuit of a coalition to aid the addition of a permanent position at the UW Farm to support academic, community-building, and campus food sustainability programs. Additionally, the Education Coordinator will research and report on funding sources to sustain this new, permanent position at the UW Farm.
Position details
This is a multi-year proposal:
- Year 1: June 2021 - December 2021
- Year 2: January 2022 - December 2022
- Year 3: January 2023 - December 2023
Hours: 10-20 hours/week on average
Position Start Date: 6/1/2021
Compensation: Master’s Student Research Assistant (RA) pay scale
Budget
A Master’s RA would make $2,436 per month at 50% FTE and have a benefit rate currently at 22.4%. The total cost would be $8,945 for salary and benefits for the quarter at their full 50%. The current on-campus tuition rate is $5,398/quarter.
Total Amount:
- Year 1: 2 quarters ($8945 + $5398) x 2 = $28,686.00
- Year 2: 4 quarters = $57,372
- Year 3: 4 quarters = $57,372
Total request for the three year grant: $143,430 over three years
Request amount and budget
How the project will react to funding reductions
If we are forced to consider a reduction in this grant, we have planned for two funding alternatives: Option A: Reduce the number of quarters that this student participates in the RA-ship. Option B: Pursue a GSA position, which would not include a tuition waiver for this graduate student, and would potentially reduce the number of hours worked each quarter. Option A Given the magnitude of the task of building coalition relationships, we believe 3 quarters of funding is the minimum standard to seeing this project into its successful completion. If we reduced the number of quarters, we would subsequently narrow-down the scope of the project. In this reduced vision, the Development Coordinator would focus on analyzing student use data to clarify student priorities for programming and creating a benefit-cost analysis of different farm staffing models into the future. Option A narrows down the focus of this project to constructing just the strategic plan, but due to time constraints, might leave out important coalition building opportunities. Option B The main goals of this RA-ship proposal would remain the same, but the cost would be reduced. Funding this opportunity through a GSA position might seem like the best option between Options A and B. The main motivator of this proposal is to address the staffing challenges at the UW Farm. As our goal is to help align staff support with the programmatic vision, it seems imprudent to approach solutions by underfunding the labor which is helping us achieve a sustainable staffing model. We are committed to improving equity in the staffing model of the farm, which includes this graduate student position. Infrastructure is important to achieving sustainability. The UW Farm is both infrastructure and a living system. The deep sustainability challenges that confront us arise within living systems. These are challenges of labor, values, and priorities. In weighing these two options, we believe we would choose Option A - to scale back the proposal rather than to fund the position as a GSA position without the tuition waiver. Tuition waivers afford graduate students with a sense of well-being and financial security. Therefore, we believe Option A most fully prioritizes the values of the type of sustainability challenges we are trying to address with this proposal.
Plans for financial longevity
The UW Farm has a well established reputation of excellence in leadership on campus sustainability efforts. This project will have an enormously important impact on the future of the UW Farm and its continued growth in integrating with academic departments and units across our university. This is a strategic moment to craft a sustainable strategic action plan for the UW Farm to grow even deeper roots and multi- and transdisciplinary partnerships to support its longevity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the farm’s prominence and potential has been increasing through strengthened and persistent partnerships with the UW Food Pantry and wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House. Student food insecurity is rising, as is support and demand for programming related to sustainable food systems and agriculture. The UW Botanic Gardens (UWBG) - the academic program in which the farm is housed - is currently undergoing a programmatic restructuring that includes hiring a new Director and creating a new position of Academic Coordinator. Additionally, the College of the Environment has recently initiated the search for a new Assistant Teaching Professor in the Environmental Studies department - this hire has in it some time to support curricular development at the UW Farm. Now is the right moment to invest the time and resources in supporting student sustainability learning and leadership on the farm by developing appropriate cross-campus support. Though this RA-ship is only planned for three academic quarters, the support during this transformative time will enable staffing to make both quality production and education possible on this site into the long term.
Problem statement
The UW Farm is currently meeting a number of priority areas in sustainability, but is facing challenges in programmatic sustainability. The UW Farm is well-known throughout the campus community and within the larger bioregion of Cascadia as a center for teaching and inspiring food system-engaged student sustainability leaders. As student and community interest in the farm has continued to grow, farm management has had to face a difficult choice: either scale back programming and risk excluding certain student groups and units, or work with the campus community to identify and sustainably support programs that are in high demand, but are currently underfunded. Though the food production poundage coming out of the UW Farm is impressive, the sustainability challenge we are meeting isn’t measured in pounds of carbon or kilowatts of energy. It will be measured by our success in scaling farm production and education activities to match the capacity of our labor force. The outcome of this project will be a strategic plan that identifies and cultivates an actionable path forward for the UW Farm to sustainably fund staffing for transdisciplinary and applied ecological, environmental, and food system sustainability programming to support student learning and community leadership.
Measure the impacts
Since the sustainability challenge that the UW Farm is grappling with is that of scale and programmatic sustainability, we believe the following measures will best capture the specific impact of this RA-ship:
- Collaborating with the Farm Advisory Committee and partners to complete a strategic action plan which will help guide UW Farm priorities and cross-campus partnership development.
- Analyzing and presenting student-use data to determine centers of student activity and potential untapped departmental collaborators.
- Constructing a benefit-cost analysis tool that will help guide UW Farm decision-making, for example as we weigh opportunities for growth and development against costs of programmatic expansion.
- Identifying a sustainable staffing model for the farm and suggesting pathways forward to build or restructure farm practices to meet that model.
We also imagine that this strategic capacity-building RA-ship will enhance the sustainability of current UW Farm goals. These goals, and their associated impacts, include:
- Providing students with practical urban farming experience, from planning to production to the table.
- Creating a model of sustainable and resilient urban food production at the UW.
- Providing reliable, predictable, certified organic, salmon-safe certified, GAP or and quality food-safety certified produce for sales, including but not limited to the UW Farm Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and UW Housing & Food Services (HFS).
- Providing over $17,000 worth of produce and garden starter seeds and plants free of charge for other uses such as the Humblefeast, UW Food Pantry, student gleaning teams, UW Farm events, and select campus fundraisers and non-UW organizations and area food banks.
- Facilitating food sovereignty initiatives and the growing of traditional foods and preserving of farming practices in cooperation with wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ, the UW Intellectual House under the Office of Minority Affairs, including the Native Garden Plot at the Center for Urban Horticulture.
- Linking, supervising and mentoring the practice of urban farming directly to over 24 interdisciplinary academic programs in the study of food, including but not limited to coursework, independent research, capstone and culminating experiences, and other experiential-learning opportunities including mentoring and collaborating on numerous ongoing CSF grants.
- Being a welcoming neighbor to the immediate community by engaging with visitors and offering volunteer programs to both UW and non-UW individuals.
- Supporting remote learning via multiple platforms daily, especially in the COVID era, to the general public and UW students and faculty in the areas of urban food systems, sustainability and resiliency.
Education and outreach goals
We envision that with the support and capacities of this Research Assistant, the UW Farm will be able to move from reacting to student needs to proactively developing educational opportunities for students, faculty, and community members alike. In this, we aim to to extend the breadth of transdisciplinary courses and programs offered by departments and units in partnership with the farm. Experiential and hands-on learning opportunities abound at the farm and support student access to high impact practices of active learning. Increasing access, inclusion, equity, and justice in food production spaces is central to our mission. The RA will further help the farm realize this principle by cultivating justice-driven, generative partnerships. Additionally, we will create mentorship opportunities to support students interested in farming and food systems - especially those historically excluded from these spaces. Increasing farm capacity can also translate into innovative research opportunities for students and faculty. Beyond university partnerships, we also hope to advance community engagement and educational opportunities by providing a thriving space that local schools and organizations can use to inspire students. Finally, supporting the academic success of all students on campus also means ensuring that they are food secure. We can contribute to this through collaboration with our partner, the UW Food Pantry. The UW Farm is a powerhouse of visionary activity. This RA position will provide vital support for a strategic analysis of our efforts and help us focus our work in ways that best match student needs and university priorities.
To communicate this work to the broader UW community, the RA will assist in social media engagement and publication strategies such as writing for the UW Farm newsletter. Specifically, the RA will contribute social media content to post on the UW Farm’s and other UW social media platforms. This RA will also mentor UW Farm AmeriCorps members and student staff interested in gaining this outreach skill. Using data from the analysis of student involvement, the RA will also reach out to student-run journalistic organizations, like The Daily, Currents, and FieldNotes to raise awareness of student-driven research and advancements in environmental justice taking place on the farm. Finally, the UW Farm will continue to take an active role in recruiting community engaged service learners through the Community Engagement & Leadership Education Center (CELE).
Student involvement
One graduate student will be hired part-time as a Research Assistant (RA) for 20 hours per week for three quarters. This student will report to Eli Wheat with site supervisor, Perry Acworth. It is essential that the student understand the educational programming and production systems of the UW Farm. However, the primary job of the RA will be to help strategize and support the creation of a stronger cross-campus coalition of departments and units willing to help integrate the farm more deeply within academic programs and opportunities. In collaboration with the UW Farm Advisory Committee, this student will help translate these relationships into mutualistic funding partnerships through a long-term, capacity-building strategic plan.