Initial design of the Watershed Fund

The Watershed Fund https://emsdcmarketplace.org/donations/watershed-fund/ is a project of Eagle Market Streets, CDC and Kevin Doyle Jones of Neighborhood Economics.org https://neighborhoodeconomics.org/ is working with them to build the community engagement around this new project.

As a thumbnail: the loans are zero interest, and farmers have a year’s grace period before they have to start paying them back, then have three years to pay. Eagle Market Streets is doing the due diligence and underwriting. Our idea is to do a lot of $10,000 loans rather than larger loans to start out in order to socialize the concept of this new source of capital and see the idea spread broadly. In initial talks with farmers, most have a pressing and immediately pressing $10k capital need, along with much bigger needs. Rayburn Farms is one of the first borrowers teed up

The Ager family, owners of Hickory Nut Gap, have, through their family foundation, given us enough money to do two $10,00 loans but none for the fund raising campaign. Stephanie and I are working on raising money for the following initial plan: to work with restaurants on benefit dinners for a farm they source from once a month to start with. Restaurants do those regularly. We want to add the opportunity for the diners at those monthly benefit dinners to link to a qr code on a table tent, and add a 5% donation to give healthy locally grown organic meals to people who cant afford to go to expensive restaurants. The plan is for the donation to go to Equalplates https://equalplatesproject.org. Equal Plates buys farm to table produce at market rate and cooks it up at Southside Kitchen for delivery to the underserved. We want to do more community engagement around the loans throughout the community and also do educational presentations in schools as we have capacity.