Clients in Conversation: Building Community Through Shared Gifting – Part I
Dec 23 2014
This article was originally published in the Fall 2014 RSF Quarterly.
Interview with Ellie Lanphier, Program Associate, Philanthropic Services
Shared Gifting is a collaborative funding model that gives ownership, distribution, and allocation authority for gift money to grantees. Here, Ethan Schaffer of Viva Farms and Rita Ordóñez of Community Action of Skagit County discuss their experience as participants of the Shared Gifting circle held by RSF in Skagit County, Washington and how their organizations are building a sustainable, local food system.
Ellie: What were your key takeaways from the Shared Gifting experience? How did your participation change how you’re working with related organizations in your region?
Rita: One thing that was really powerful for me was just the sharing aspect—who we are as people and how we came to this event. I don’t think about that often in any meeting or experience. It was great to get the chance to actually know who we were sitting with. It was also interesting to be at the table with folks that we had not worked with previously. We were able to create some relationships that weren’t present before.
Ethan: For me, the community aspect was really powerful—having the opportunity to see all of these programs within our region, and to think about how we can spread the resources that we have amongst our peers. It was a very different way of thinking about our organizations, how they relate to each other, and how we are all funded. It made us think more about what our priorities are as a community.
Rita: Yes, suddenly we had these new people to be able to reach out to, and from that we have been able to explore new opportunities together. The experience made a different sort of work available, one that is shared among several organizations.
Ethan: We’ve been partnering with Rita and Community Action on a number of things like Fresh Fridays Farm Stand. The purpose of that collaboration was to prototype something in which we could help local low-income residents understand where they can get access to healthy, fresh local food, and learn about resources to pay for it. And then also, to learn how to prepare some of these foods, some of the odd varieties and different things that people haven’t tried before, and pull that all into this event –basically kind of a mini-farmers market, hosted right at Skagit Community Action.
Community Action is really the main provider of social services in Skagit County. They do services from A to Z. They issue WIC checks, and provide mobile food bank services. Really, they have the deepest access and reach into communities of need in the county.
It’s a great collaboration with Viva and other farmers markets to be able to go right where people are already used to going. So, on the days when WIC checks are being issued we set up a Fresh Friday resource fair, to connect with people who had maybe never been to a farmers market and didn’t realize they could get a bundle of checks to use exclusively for local products.
Rita: One of the interesting things I heard at the end of last week was from a farmer who was there. He thought the event was great and really important to get word about it out to the Latino community. Even as a farmer, he had never eaten kale before. He learned three ways to prepare it at the fair and was really excited to take that home to his family.
Some of the positive things that happened were things that we didn’t even expect. These lessons just come from bringing people together in this way around healthy, locally-grown food—there’s just so much information that passes between people.
Ethan: At Viva, we’re in an exciting place. We have a few years under our belt now. We’ve had four growing seasons, and we’re starting to see some of our farmers get more established. I think they are ready to expand, and so we’re starting to try to figure out what will it take to help them grow to mid-sized businesses that can be sustainable on their own.
It’s especially great right now, because there have been a lot of issues within the farm worker community up here. To have a few success stories, of farm workers who’ve made the transition to farm ownership, is particularly inspiring for other farm workers right now.
Rita: That’s great, Ethan. We just did a purchase yesterday from Sal [Viva Farms farmer], and he had almost 300 pounds of these beautiful green beans that he harvested. He and I talked about his own personal health journey and his own eating habits changing. Again, I think it’s these things that you don’t expect to come from some of the work that you’ve done or the information you’ve provided that changes their lives. He’s a great success story.
Ellie: After the Shared Gifting experience, did you have any thoughts about how more direct, transparent funding could help your organization and your region be more successful?
Ethan: I would love for the USDA to start doing a transparent shared gifting process.
Rita: I think it would be amazing for anybody to offer it. Most of the time, we send these grant proposals to the “Great Oz”. We have no real idea about what shakes out or what comes after. The thought of being together in a group and having that conversation – like Ethan said earlier, about setting priorities and looking at our community – would be such a powerful model that would really help. If we had a process in place across these different grants that we apply for, it really could help us to realize success and come up with some other ways of looking at how to fund what we’re doing.
Just having space where you can have those conversations is a huge step forward, and then having it tied to a funder being open to looking at what the community values adds an empowering dimension. How are we going to decide how they want to split this money? It’s really transformative for the work that we’re trying to do, and for the hope and the help that we’re trying to give to people.
Ethan: You know, it was interesting – I felt kind of nervous going into the meeting a little bit. I just didn’t know what the process would be like, and what the results would be – if everybody would play nicely, or even worse, if they weren’t honest and open with each other. And even right after the process, it took time to sink in before I started realizing really what was happening there. It was a very powerful experience, to feel accountable to our peers.
I realized that there are so many cool benefits that came out of this as sort of a one-time deal. But what would happen if we did this every year? What if we started delivering grant reports in different ways, and check-ins to our peer network and the other organizations that we’re working with? How would that change how we work with each other?
I really think it could transform the social sector and community. I’d love to test it out – that if you really went for it and said, we’re going to do this every year for ten years, you’d have a completely different result that could be totally transformative.
Rita Ordóñez lives in the Skagit Valley with her husband, landscape painter, Ron Farrell, and their two children, Roland and Olivia. She has been a local food activist since 2004, working on healthy food access for low income families at food banks, farmers markets, and schools across the State of Washington. Rita is currently the Community Food Access Manager for Community Action of Skagit County. She has a BA in Geography from Western Washington University and a MA in Geography from the University of Washington.
Ethan Schaffer is the co-founder of Viva Farms, a 33-acre bilingual farm incubator program in the Skagit Valley. The program helps beginning and Latino farmers transition to farm ownership. Viva Farms won the Green Washington Award, placed first at the Seattle Social Innovation Fast Pitch, and has received coverage in national press, including in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. Ethan holds an MBA from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
