Watershed Fund

Crowd funding through benefit dinners at restaurants for farm to table farmers, and farm dinners for farmers who don’t sell to restaurants. https://neighborhoodeconomics.org/wiki/index.php/Watershed_Fund

This where I will try to outline the emerging partnership and stakeholder network around the Watershed Fund on this wiki. I use wikis for outlining processes and players and the ecosystem. Feel free to add to it or edit it, if that’s your preference, but this will help me keep up to date on the network’s growth and partnership engagement. No need to pay it any attention if you don’t want to. It’s a tool I use at this phase of a multi stake holder engagement, where we are coming to market with each other, in a sense, and linking our brands, for this project, and maybe also in Greenville, SC and other places.

The product we at Neighborhood Economics will build to enhance the zero interest investment is a field guide to engaging in the food system in your watershed. There will also be a version for faith communities. We hope to link with Abundance Capital’s pool of donors who believe in giving to invest for justice. The dinners will be promoted by jb media. We will produce the graphics and the content to accompany the promotion, they will do the social media, using our logos, etc

I will start listing players and organizations and partners here and have each one be their own page, to start. I am excited that Veronika Gunter is our project manager from JB Media. She’s done big things and a diverse number of interesting and good things. Margaret Gifford, with her partner Mike Gatchell at Abundance Capital have the nation’s only locally focuses, justice focused donor advised fund platform. Margaret has deep knowledge of food investing.

Stephanie Swepson Twitty the CEO of Eagle Market Streets CDC, the fund issuer) is in this project, entering the market with their Watershed Fund with Neighborhood Economics. To start, besides hosting the benefit dinners, [[Neighborhood Economics]will be producing an engagement field guide to the food system in your watershed to help new donors give to invest more in their local community using the portal of the benefit dinners for farm to table restaurants with their farmers. Eagle will do the due diligence and underwriting of the zero interest investment and will work with technical assistance providers with farmers. Neberecon will tell the story and engage people with the fund and the issues in the food system they could be engaged in. Being ever mindful that we need to produce a resilient food system that will be ready for the time when it no longer makes sense to ship in food. So this is a future proofing initiative that is also a collective climate change response. partners in the existing farm system technical assistance, business advisory, networking and connections, some funding