The SeedMoney Challenge is a group crowdfunding competition open to any public food garden project located anywhere in the world. Participating projects include youth gardens, community gardens, community farms, and food bank gardens. Participants keep 100% of what they raise and compete for challenge grants of $100 to $1000. The more funds a project raises, the larger the grant it qualifies to receive.
SeedMoney is a Maine-based 501c3 nonprofit. Their mission is to help more individuals and communities, especially disadvantaged ones, to grow more of their own healthy food. They do this by empowering like-minded community groups working at the local level to raise the funds they need to start and sustain food garden projects through what they call crowdgrants.
Eligibility
Open to a wide variety of food garden projects including but not limited to school gardens, community gardens, food pantry gardens, homeless shelter gardens, job training gardens, tribal gardens, senior gardens, library gardens, college gardens, orphanage gardens, demonstration gardens, healing and therapeutic gardens, as well as hybrid versions of the projects above that defy easy categorization (i.e. a community garden project involving seniors who are growing extra food for their local food pantry).
Although the garden projects are very diverse, they all share a few common denominators: they must be food gardens; they must be public gardens (i.e. SeedMoney can’t fund an individual’s private garden even if that person is donating the produce to others); and they must be proposed by nonprofit causes that are able to prove their nonprofit status.
Applications may be from anywhere in the world.
Grant
The grant varies from project to project, depending on the number of people in their community to whom they can ask for support. The average amount raised per project is about $800, but they have had projects raise as much as $15,000.
